Re: [OT] speeding boot process (was Re: [ANNOUNCE] hotplug-ng 001 release)

Jim Crilly
2005-02-15T03:38:35Z

Lee Revell said the following:
> The reason I marked by response OT is that the time from power on to
> userspace does not seem to be a big problem. It's the amount of time
> from user space to presenting a login prompt that's way too long. My
> distro (Debian) runs all the init scripts one at a time, and GDM is the
> last thing that gets run. There is just no reason for this. We should
> start X and initialize the display and get the login prompt up there
> ASAP, and let the system acquire the DHCP lease and start sendmail and
> apache and get the date from the NTP server *in the background while I
> am logging in*. It's not rocket science.

That is one of the "features" that I hate most about Windows. All you really do
is move the delays around. For instance, my Windows machine at work is joined
to a domain and has the Novell NetWare client installed for NDS auth (don't
ask) so when the GINA comes up, I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del, enter my password and wait
staring at an hourglass while the GINA waits for network connectivity to come
up so that it can authenticate me. And even if authentication was local and I
got logged in right away, chances are good that I have mapped drives or
printers on the network that I will have to wait for during the login process
anyway.

I agree boot up is too slow and that some things should be started in the
background, but not things that are required for the main purpose of the box to
work properly, what should be started sync and what should be async is a hard
decision IMO. Right now I use swsusp2 to work around this, it takes less time
to resume my session + 500M of file cache than it does to boot manually and
start all of my apps back up, but obviously that's not a real solution.

>
> Lee
>

Jim.