--- Jos <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > http://www.stack.nl/~josh/Mandrake
Hello Jos! I think you have an excellent page there. Here are some thinkings: - Harddrake should *not* be disabled by default. If one changes some piece of hardware (they'll probably do that while their system is off :) strange things may happen to their system. You may not change your hardware often, but I for example have my case on table sitting open so I could quickly change sth if I wanted to. Just last year I upgraded my memory three times, added a hard disk, a burner, and many other tiny changes I can't remember now. This is how many people use their PCs, including people that consider themselves competent enough to mess inside their computer case but shell scares the hell out of them. At work we change monitors, keyboards and mice all the time (because all are really crappy and everyone tries to get a better one) and all Linux computers tend to freak out when the monitor is changed. Removing harddrake might be sensible for laptops and computers that are known to be black-boxes (servers, non tech-savvy users; I'd like to make that call myself). - I don't think parallelizing helps on computers with a single CPU that doesn't support hyperthreading. Sure we both need hard figures to back up our claims, but I believe the effort can be spent much better by rethinking some services and making their selection smarter! Think about it: * laptops don't need harddrake (4 seconds) * people without a network card don't need NFS/SMB/TMDNS (3-4 seconds) * people not sharing printers and scanners can afford to start cups and scannerdrake after the desktop is up (10 seconds) and other such examples. That's 18 seconds or more than 20% of overall boot-up time. I don't think parallelization can bring that much benefit. Also consider splitting harddrake in part that is needed to run X (detecting video card, monitor and mouse) and the rest that runs after the desktop is up. It can even show a nice GUI for new hardware :) What else can be delayed after the GUI is up? To people bashing windows for this: please think about it, it's a feature. I want to start doing productive things as soon as possible. This is a desktop machine we're talking about. I don't care if 90% of hardware isn't working yet if I can startup my editor/browser/e-mail program (sometimes I want to hack rc so openoffice is started before everything else, so i don't have to wait 20 sec for it ;) - I agree completely on depmod. - I also agree that using bash slows down things. But I don't think that writing rc script itself in C will help much. rc script is only a small portion of overhead, I think that the bigger problem are scripts in init.d that are 100% bash, such as devfsd script that makes a bunch of symbolic links and stuff. One another thing: consider the services that already work in background: scannerdrake, usb detection, xfs, apmd, cups, crond, xinetd, kheader, devfsd. Parallelizing tasks is as easy as adding a & to appropriate script. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
