rcpar, parallel boot written in C

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to gmane.linux.debian.devel.general as well.

[Maximiliano Curia]
> After Marga's talk in Debconf6, I've been working in a program that
> starts the initscripts in parallel [1]. It's similar in some aspects
> to startpar (part of sysvinit package) but with two main goals: it
> must work, it must be as little intrusive as possible (in respect to
> the scripts behavior).

What is the speed impact compared to the non-parallel boot and a boot
with startpar and shell parallelization?

> The idea is to have a working parallel boot system, which could be
> accompanied by something similar to insserv[2], to have the smallest
> possible boot time.
>
> The current version is almost a proof of concept, but works quite
> well with non-interactive initscripts. It still does not handle the
> input for scripts like checkroot.sh, scripts that prompt for a
> passphrase, or similar. Anyway, I'll be working in the support of
> interactive scripts for the next few days.
>
> It's not ready to be released, nor to be included in Debian, but I
> would really like to have some eyes over it, some comments and
> suggestions.
>
> I might make a package for this soon, but I still have to figure out how to 
> modify /etc/init.d/rc from outside the sysvinit package.
>
> [1] The darcs repository is available in http://maxy.com.ar/~maxy/darcs/rcpar
> [2] insserv uses the new lsb initscripts tags to reorder them, but it's too 
> SUSE based

As Martin comments, the initscripts-ng project is a better place for
this topic.  CC to it, and lets continue the discussion there.

A similar system to yours was proposed by Olivier Sessink.  Check out
The thread starting at
<URL:http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/initscripts-ng-devel/2005-November/000225.html>

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen