Gregory Symons posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Thu, 14 Apr 2005 10:10:49 -0400:
> I think it doesn't handle parallel booting very well... the progress bar > sometimes goes backwards Parallel booting may or may not work. I get the feeling from the comments I've seen that they only put it in because people wanted it, but it complicates things enough, and for little enough gain*, that the only support you may get for a parallel boot issue is instructions for turning the option back off. It worked here for quite awhile, then quit, with network services. Seems the newer network script returns "up" for the dependencies before it actually /is/ up, so all the associated networking daemons start. For stuff like privoxy and bind, that works fine -- they could actually start independent of network except there'd be little use for them, at least since I only access them thru loopback anyway, so that's all they have to listen to, but ntp-client doesn't work so well when the net's down, since it needs it immediately, which means ntpd won't work as well either, since it may have a quite a way to skew, when the net /does/ come up and it can connect, which will of course do "interesting" things to its drift calculations. Anyway, I had to turn parallel startup back off, to get things to work right again. *Parallel startup seldom gains all /that/ much anyway, because only certain things are dependency free enough to do so, and what's gained by the parallel init is often almost lost due to the attempt to disk seek multiple items, often relatively far apart on the disk, at once. Of course, this doesn't necessarily apply for those with good, high-speed RAID arrays, particularly if they are multi-processor (or multi-core) as well. Anyway, the largest time taker here is the on-boot quick-fsck, which is early enough in the boot process nearly everything else depends on it, so it can't be paralleled. Even if it could, again, the bottleneck is the disk access so throwing additional disk access in to load something else isn't going to help. So... the option is there for those that want to play with it, but it's not enabled by default because the benefits are normally quite low, and the potential complications rather high. As such, it's not surprising to me at all that the progress bar has a few bugs in it, when used in that mode. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- [email protected] mailing list
