IDEA: Shortening boot-time

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

Is there a simple way to find what is causing the disk IO?  Each
script starts /bin/sh and then sources /etc/init.d/functions.  Is
there any way to save that IO?  You could build a static /bin/sh
hacked to have the stuff in /etc/init.d/functions as builtins.

Another completely off-the-wall thing to try could be somehow
compiling the individual init.d files into one thing that gets
executed at startup.  Honestly, many of the startup files follow a
basic template and under normal circumstances many of them do exactly
the same thing.  Why run a whole bunch of shell code to run a daemon,
check the return value and touch a file in /var/lock/subsys?

 - J<