IDEA: Shortening boot-time

[Stephen J Smoogen]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 03:16:50PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> 
>>The last time this was tried, the total speedup was on the order of
>>10% or so. Perhaps it's changed, but it wasn't a extreme speedup.
> 
> 
> Yeah, I remember that. But hey, I'll take 10%. And it's probably somewhat
> more on SMP and hyperthreading system.
> 
> And really, speedup and parallelization is only an incidental benefit --
> it'd be nice for services to know what they need before they start, rather
> than depending on magic number ordering.
> 

I am not sure it was 10% or that SMP/hyperthreading is going to make a 
difference. Most of the time I can tell looks to be stuck on diskdrive. 
And depending on the disk-drive.. that can be sloooooow. [My Dell laptop 
disk-drive is incredibly slow on random seeks. It causes all kinds of 
slowdowns at times I wish it didnt. What would be interesting would be 
if a pseudo ramdisk of /etc startups would speed anything up (though the 
copying of it into RAM would probably be as expensive.)

Crazy idea. Make /etc RAID-1 with a ramdisk (well not really, but I 
think I am conveying the idea). Any changes get mirrored to disk, and 
initial reads are incredibly fast. Do it with /dev also..