Interesting article on boot ordering

[Havoc Pennington]

On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 21:22, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> hp at redhat.com (Havoc Pennington) writes:
> 
> > Some UI goals to keep in mind for reworking bootup include:
> 
> For me, UI goals are nearly uninteresting. 

If we're going to spend a lot of effort reworking the initscripts setup
it should solve the UI stuff as well, or we might have to rework again
in the future to meet the overall project goals.

>   With alternative concepts (e.g. minit, djb's supervise, runit, ...),
>   the died process would be restarted automatically.

Important here to detect the infinite-rapid-restart case probably.
Something like: M restarts in N seconds means give up for a while.
Seems likely that most systems handle this somehow.

> minit on my laptop needs 7 seconds from /sbin/minit startup till the
> 'login:' prompt. Shutdown happens in 5 seconds.

Now that would definitely be worth switching to, this is a huge, huge 
improvement. If we can make this happen I would be pretty excited.

> >  - graphical display showing progress (with optional way to get at 
> >      the detailed technical messages, of course)
> 
> 7 seconds boot-time (+5 seconds kernel-startup) do not require a
> progress-meter... ;)

It'd still be nice to have a splash screen instead of scrolling
messages. ;-) But yes, point taken. Starting up rhgb probably takes
longer than this whole boot.

On the LSB issue - by my reading of the LSB spec, it specifies how an
app should install an initscript and what that script should be like,
but it doesn't say the distribution itself has to install any
initscripts.

So I don't see why we couldn't run any scripts found in the LSB
location. It only costs a readdir() to check for scripts; if none are
found, it's free, if we find some we have to run them.

Havoc