Re: eINIT

[Robert Luciani <rluciani@xxxxxxxxx>]

Christopher Rawnsley wrote:
> I came across this today:
> 
> "eINIT is a replacement for /sbin/init -- the programme that is
> responsible for booting your computer -- that is all about not wasting
> resources; that's not wasting CPU cycles, but also not wasting RAM
> either, which should make eINIT very well suited for embedded
> applications. However, that's not to say eINIT wouldn't work fine (and
> swiftly) on regular desktops, laptops or servers."
>   -- http://einit.org/node/63
> 
> Thought someone might be interested. It's licensed under the 3-clause
> BSD and could even make a good GSoC project.
> 
> -- 
> Chris

Not that anyone reboots often nowadays (even with laptops you just
suspend) but the init system has been discussed to death in Linux-land.
Most moderately fast computers have timeouts and disk latency as the
bottleneck during boot, not CPU usage. In addition, if we were to
replace the init system, it should be with something that is a bit
sophisticated with features like: service dependency lists, automatic
respawning, two way communication with running processes, supervision of
children from parent processes, "user" services, and more...

OTOH, if booting faster is what you really want, one trick that Linux
distros have been using, which seems to give moderate speed boosts on
old computers, is to monitor file access during boot and then create one
big file for it to cache before anything else. Another trick that some
have used is to bring up the gui before anything else (a la Windows).

-- 
Robert Luciani
Chalmers University of Technology, SWE
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
http://www.rluciani.com/public.key