Re: [dev] Suckless operating system

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 09:29:58AM +0200, Troels Henriksen wrote:
> Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Regarding the boot speed I disagree. I think short boot cycles can be
> > achieved with rather more simple init systems than the insanity people
> > got used to like the SysV style Debian insanity. A simple BSD init
> > based or even more simple system always outperforms any "smart"
> > technique in my observation.
>
> Well, for really excellent performance, you do need the ability to
> parallelise the init operations, so that's a bit of complexity that has
> actual performance benefits.
>
> I agree there is little value in the general runlevel mess.

I fully agree. after looking to minit & stuff, I decided to write our own
init daemon to incorporate some safety stuff.
* booting is done in parallel.
* udev (+/- 5sec) was replaced by our (small) fdev (now takes some 0.1 sec).

some examples:
dell laptop: booting was over 45 seconds (from kernel starting timers), now 15.
via epia board: was 25, now 4.3 seconds
embedded ARM cpu: (never used debian there, but busybox): no final measurements,
but boottime of 18 seconds got reduced to 6.
OpenMoko: boottime is originally (very long) 2m40s, reduced to 35.

I admit our init is quit more complex than strictly necessary (we try to guarantee
that a watched process is not dead-locked, and therefore have a hardware watchdog
in the init process, and ...).

I'm not familiar with BSD init's.

Kurt

>
> --
> \ Troels
> /\ Henriksen
>
Received on Mon Jun 14 2010 - 11:51:21 UTC