userland boot time

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:59:39 +0100 Michael 'Mickey' Lauer <mickey at openmoko.org>
babbled:

> Carsten Haitzler wrote:
> > sure. but even here there are stages - the bit where x comes up and
> > displays a fixed ppm to keep u amused - and then you watch that sit there
> > for a while until the windowmanager and god knows what else get their act
> > together. by the look of things this could also be improved. who need the
> > xdefaults stuff anymore - for example?   settings-dameon is a heavy beastie
> > too. it links a lot of shared libs i seriously doubt it needs to do its
> > core job. it's sucked in libpng, zlib, freetype, pango. libxfixes, xcurso,
> > randr.... when all it does is read data form gconf (which is probably what
> > sucks all these in) can set x properties. removing gconf all it needs is
> > libX11 and libc really. so as part of this glib fun we get gconv
> > internationalization init stuff (settings-daemon has no need to worry about
> > translations), a bunch of dbus-launch stuff (not sure where that came from)
> > that should really have been done as the parent process to the xsession,
> > not as children to settings-daemon, then running xrdb AGAIN in addition to
> > the xrdb run by the startup scripts... all of this shenanigans takes about
> > 15 seconds of wall-clock time.
> 
> Two interesting approaches to "fix" this would be:
> 
> a) Ditch X and write a nice and fast, framebuffer-based SmartPhone application
> controller. [yes, accelleration may be a problem here]

nah - settings-daemon is something brewed up for gtk land stuff. it's heavy in
terms of libraries, linking and requirements. i read the code for it. it could
be stripped down even more than OH have done - i suspect it could become a lot
leaner.

> Or
> 
> b) Come up with a framebuffer-based interface, launch X in the
> backround on another VT, then switch seamlessly to it.

isn't the splashscreen (psplash for example) for that? :) i'm talking right now
"X is up - but the X client apps are busy starting up". not sure ditching x is
the right thing to a "you are just starting/using x inefficiently" problem :)

-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>