[Soc-coordination] SoC boot project weekly summary week #3/14

[Carlos Villegas]

Hi, on Petter's request I will start a weekly summary in parallel to the
blog (which will be updated in a daily basis). This summary accounts for
the third week since the projet was accepted (8-14 June).

This third week I looked at the woody, sarge and etch releases from
Debian. They were installed with KDE (with autologin) and bootchart. The
results were 32 sec for woody, 44 sec for sarge and 34 sec for Etch
...(sid results go here)... Nevertheless, it seems that bootchart stops
logging before you're actually logged in to KDE. An approach to solve
this is to modify bootchart such that it stops until a program specified
in kdm PostSession. The current results are available in
(http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/bootcharts.html).

Nevertheless, I didn't keep any log of the installation procedure while
just accepting all the default configuration (except for using always
KDE). I'll keep a log on the future to  evaluate and understand the
difference in boot times.

Besides, I looked at the SUSE, Mandriva and Fedora distributions to
analyse their boot process. The most interesting so far has been  SUSE
being LSB compliant and having insserv/startpar to set and ajust the
dependencies for parallalel booting. rcorder in FreeBSD does something
similar although it seems to do check dependencies in two stages during
the boot (with root fs and with all mounted filesystems) and does not
support runlevels. Fedora looks like a regular sysvinit  process
although it contains LSB information in the initscripts that is read by
chkconfig to set dependencies in the /etc/rc<X>.d directories.
Nevertheless, the dependencies don't adjust to added/substracted
scripts. Ubuntu distribution looks to be very similar to debian but with
readahead. On the other hand, Sun's SMF self heal system seems to be
implemented with Ubuntu in the NexentaOS
(http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki/Nexenta_OS) but haven't looked at it.
Finally Mandriva 2006 doesn't seem to have pinit/prcsys in their default
configuration so it seems to have a standard sysvinit.

Finally, the deliverable is being written in latex (with pdf and html
versions generated together) using svn for version control. It is
currently available at
(http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/deliverable1/index.html) 

and will be ready for review this sunday evening (GMT time).

Well, hope to have your feedback

carlos


-- 

Carlos Villegas
----------------------------------------
Hamilton Institute
NUIM, Maynooth, Co. Kildare
Ireland
Tel: +353 1 708 6458
Fax: +353 1 708 6269
www.hamilton.ie/cemacs