userland boot time

[Tilman Baumann]

Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:

> b) ditch sysvinit and use a better init system. This has a reasonable
> speed impact and keeps OpenMoko flexible. However, it's quite a bit of work,
> since OpenEmbedded is pretty sysvinit-centric -- yet.

Most SysV-init replacements can do both. So we could do a graduate 
change. (Though i would prefer a radical change to get it done.)
Ubuntu for example switched to upstart but never really changed the init 
scripts. Speed improvement -> NULL. And since apparently nobody kicks 
the maintainers in the butt, nothing changes...

Has anyone yet proven that Ubuntu's upstart would work fine on a 
embedded system like ours?

If speed and size is no concern, i would really like upstart.
But there are some real embedded focused alternatives too.
cinit, minit, and something similar from busybox (don't know the last)
And probably more...
All of them are dependency driven. (They call it sometimes needs syntax)

> c) keep sysvinit and just shuffle around runlevels and services. This
> will have the least speed impact, but could be sufficient to improve
> the user experience. We could, e.g. invent a new runlevel that only
> starts the necessary services to get X starting up and then go to init
> 5, starting other services in the background while the user can
> operate the device.
> 
> Obviously, option a) would be the _very_ last resort, if all else
> fails.
> 
> I like option b) a lot. Going towards upstart not only allows
> launching services in parallel, but even more important, it comes with
> an event based system that could make the initscript mess much more
> straightforward.

And it can launch services when needed.
For example launch gpsd only when a program needs a position.

Last time i chcked upstart war prettey much work in progress, but this 
is some time ago...


Just my 2 Eurocent
  Tilman Baumann

PS: I'm thinking about making myself useful on this topic. Have 
currently no development system set up, but this will be my next task...
Besides the lack of GPRS, the start up speed is something that bothers 
me very much. But i can do something about, unlike gspd/GPRS. :)