Hello,
some of you may have read some wiki pages about the plans for the new init system [1]. As a first step in this direction [2], I packaged prcsys from Mandriva, patched initscripts with a very small patch, and uploaded the src.rpm to [3]. To enable parallel booting just build and install both packages and edit /etc/sysconfig/init. Set PARALLEL_STARTUP=yes and there we go.
The next step would be to modify all initscripts in /etc/init.d to be LSB compliant [4]. This will speed up booting, because they can and will be started in parallel. You should file bugzillas against the component, to which this initscript belongs, with a patch (this has to be done anyway to be LSB compliant in regards to initscripts over time). Especially the exit codes need to be fixed (which will make status queries a lot easier and more robust).
Early login [5] is also a next step towards a "fast boot" user experience.
Alternatives to SysVInit (like upstart/initng) can live in Fedora as well, but we are very conservative in changing the startup mechanism that proved to function for a long time now. Unless the "real" killer feature is absolutly needed, we would like to keep backwards compatibility as long as possible.
I hope many of you try and test [3] and write patches to improve our service initscripts to be LSB compliant :-) Parallel booting is the reward.
Happy testing, Harald
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FCNewInit [2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FCNewInit/RC [3] http://people.redhat.com/harald/downloads/initscripts/parallel/ [4] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FCNewInit/Initscripts [5] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FCNewInit/xdm