Etch boots as fast as Woody...

[Carlos Villegas]

Hi,

I've been reading the latest posts on the HackFest for alternative inits 
and sounds quite interesting. Who may participate on these things? Is it 
just for developers or interested people can sign in?

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know about some boot speed tests I did 
on Etch based on the SoC2006 work and using the same system. It was 
interesting to see that, under the same conditions, the system required 
32 seconds until KDE started. Compared with the previous stable releases:
     * Woody - 32 seconds
     * Sarge - 44 seconds
     * Etch - 32 seconds

Nevertheless, Etch has significantly more process started at boot time 
and the CPU usage is more intensive --with still some room for 
improvement --. I've added the bootcharts in the initscript-ng webpage:
http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/bootcharts.html#etch40

Besides, I tried the hotspots I tried during the SoC2006. As I starting 
point, using dash instead of dash, the boot time is reduced to 30 
seconds and it could be further improved but there is some "hald" 
process (maybe part of dbus) that doesn't seem to want to run in parallel.

Any further attempts to reduce the boot time was useless :(

cheers,

Carlos Villegas