Hello, I have an idea (ok, maybe not an original idea, but bear with me :) It involves the sysvinit (/etc/init.d/rcS and a lotta other stuff) and dpkg packages. (update-rc.d)
Parallelized booting. What this means is we run multiple bootup scripts simultaneously. It's a *lot* faster on mid-to-higher-end machines, even with just one CPU - it'd be wickedly fast with SMP. "Hey wait a second that won't work!!! What if the netstd_nfs script runs before the netbase script is done processing?" Well, you're right, but I have another (slightly more original) idea that will make it work. Boot-time dependancies. * Instead of relying on those icky priority numbers we just had a flame war or two about, the packages tell us how they *really* feel and state precisely in a file (I'm thinking /etc/init.d/deps/[KS]packagename) what needs to be successfully running (or not running) before or after they can start. Do we need to make this information separate for each runlevel? (i.e. make it /etc/rc?.d/deps/[KS]packagename instead?) * /etc/init.d/rc is modified to call a program that determines the order the scripts should be run in, on the fly. I figure this won't be much of a speed hit. Slrn can thread thousands of messages per second across a localhost news connection on my machine, sorting 30 scripts shouldn't take long either. Actually, we don't even need to thread, we can probably get away with just checking on script exit (any script exit) whether there's something else available to run or not - if there's nothing else available but there's still stuff that wants to be run, we can just run it anyway. * Because a fatal error on bootup is simply not an acceptable option, dependancies are considered 'soft' - if a dependancy can not be met for whatever reason, it is simply ignored. (This is what our existing setup with priority numbers does anyway.) We'd want to keep a debugging flag in the works to reveal such a situation though. * update-rc.d is modified to ignore priority numbers and keep things in the new format. (hmmm, perhaps we can be trickier than this.) Problems looming: * Installing new packages using the new dependancy format on older machines without thread-scripts needs to be handled - perhaps we can keep the NN switch to update-rc.d calls in new packages (at least for a while) * Going back and forth from the old setup to the new one won't be a walk in the park. I'd need to make a conversion utility. * My coding skills ;) I still have yet to create proof-of-concept code for this but the general idea has created such a buzz in #debian that we might just see something :) As for the file formats of /etc/init.d/deps/[KS]packagename, I was thinking something along the lines of: After: <packagename> <anotherpackagename> <etc> Before: <morestuff> <goeshere> I feel this information absolutely positively must be admin-editable, which dictates some type of text file format. Perhaps we could give it the idea of psuedo-packagenames such as 'everything' so we can have 'After: everything' for Srmnologin and Sxdm. i.e. /etc/init.d/deps/Sbind would have: -CUT- After: sysklogd kerneld netstd_init -CUT- If we are ever going to do this it would require at least the agreement of Miquel van Smoorenburg, Klee Dienes, and Ian Jackson (current sysvinit and dpkg maintainers) and a good concensus among the Debian developers, preceeded by a LOT of discussion, so I figured I'd throw it out onto debian-devel and await the replies: "so... what *is* that you're smoking?" :) Please let me know what you think of this. -- Robert Woodcock - [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses" -- Richard Gabriel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
