Re: eINIT

[Julius Huang <juliushuang@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Mar 21, 2008, at 15:40 , Robert Luciani wrote:
> 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...

Like launchd, BootCache and Prefetch in Mac OS X.

launchd can do dependency, auto respawning, etc.

MacPorts also take advantage of launchd if user install Service like  
Apache, Bind, etc.

FreeBSD has ported the launchd.

http://wiki.freebsd.org/launchd

Not *BSD Licensing but APSL.

> 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).

For BootCache and some tricks that Mac OS X use to make system look  
faster.
 (Windows do something like it as well).

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/optimizations/

J.

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