[openmoko-devel] help with slow boot times, anyone? ;)

[Magnus Deininger]

HI there dear openmoko community :)

I'm Magnus Deininger, aka jyujin, head of the eINIT project  
(http://einit.org/). One of my teammates is telling me that openmoko  
phones are booting a bit slow... and we'd kinda like to help with  
that, so I'd like to introduce the project and maybe invite some  
interested developers to #einit on freenode.

Basically, eINIT is a replacement for init, just like initng, upstart,  
launchd and all the other fancy new inits on the block. Our approach  
to the issue is a bit different to the others tho, we're mostly  
focusing on doing things in parallel as well as keeping a low memory  
profile and cutting the need for /bin/sh wherever possible. We're a  
bit tight on developers, so progress ain't the fastest, but we're  
going steady either way and we managed to get some nice bootcharts  
onto einit.org to demonstrate that we are, in fact, a good deal faster  
than than regular sysv/shell based inits. (morphir links a couple  
chart on his blog on einit.org). There's also a neat demonstration  
video on google video, with a computer booting from lilo to gnome with  
compiz... not much to see since it's fast, but hey:  
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2744120711983143659 .

So back to the reason for me writing this mail: morphir reported that  
openmoko phones can take a good 2 minutes to boot... which ain't so  
great, and that might put people off, since a lot of people kinda  
expect 'non-computer devices' to be instant-on. Now, i can't promise  
einit will /quite/ provide /that/ effect (sub-1s bootup's really  
tricky), but we'd definitely like to help out and make it  
substantially /faster/ than it is right now. Now, none of us actually  
/has/ a neo, so we can't precisely port this without some help and  
just link you to a package -- we'd really like to, but without the  
actual hardware, this /is/ a bit tricky. Thus the offer -- if anyone's  
interested, just /join #einit on freenode. And, I'll try to keep an  
eye on this 'ere mailinglist too. (+ I'll install the neo1973 qemu in  
the mean time as well ;)).

Greets, and happy hacking,
Magnus Deininger
http://einit.org/