hello darlings, well i actually followed the FAQ http://www.tux.org/lkml/#s3-17 on this one, and got to try 'do a search' bit, and when searches for 'parallel boot initialisation' came up with discussions about parallel ports, and articles on ibm developerworks about sysvinit, i made the decision to post this anyway.
I Have A Great Idea(tm) and would like to describe it concisely to see if anyone likes it and hopefully hasn't thought of it before so i'm not consuming people's time. The idea is: parallel device initialisation of built-in modules, to reduce kernel boot time. parallel initialisation is taken care of in user-space by modifying udev coldplug scripts to watch subsets of the /sys/class/*/event files disappearing, and by using things like depinit, startpar for suse, gentoo's parallel startup system (inspired by depinit) .. but is there _anything_ like this actually in the linux kernel itself? i don't believe so, and the reasoning i base that on is that when i boot my devices (be it a pc or be it an HTC smartphone device i'm helping to reverse-engineer) the kernel startup log is always the same, and that multiple messages coming from the same device (printks) are always grouped together. i realise that that's slightly faulty reasoning: it could be that device initialisation is so regular like clockwork that the output is always the same... anyway. now i have to try some things, as an experiment. and i would like to start with asic3 platform_device, because it contains dynamically-created lists of child devices and so is a model example of the kind of dependency-hierarchy that's needed. so, i seek people's advice on this rather naive approach: simply set up a workqueue and call schedule_work() on each of the asic3 child platform_devices. does that sound reasonable, or is it just too simplistic? l. p.s. see last few lines of asic3_probe, here, where platform_add_devices() is called: http://handhelds.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/linux/kernel26/drivers/soc/asic3_base.c?rev=1.28&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup p.p.s. whilst my 1.2ghz fujitsu laptop (debian/unstable) with depinit takes only 20 seconds to get from 1st process being run (/sbin/depinit) to xorg running, it takes ANOTHER 20 seconds to get from kernel boot up to 1st process (/sbin/depinit) ! that's with a standard debian kernel - hence my interest in cutting that time to ... well... under 5 seconds would be nice. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
