Thanks for Ted Cc'ing me on this. I'm not on the lsb-spec list (I'm on enough lists already!).
> ------- Forwarded Message > From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > There's actually another way these dependencies can be used, and > happily, either Richard Gooch had the same idea I had, or he read the > LSB spec and decided to implement it (don't know which). Anyway, a > Debian developer recently pointed me at this: > > http://www.atnf.csiro.au/~rgooch/linux/boot-scripts/ As it says in the first paragraph of this document, these scripts came about because Patrick (Jordan) and I have bitched and moaned to each other for years about the way Unix systems boot. In January/February this year when I was back in Sydney we spent an evening deciding the One True Way[tm] to boot systems. I coded it up and in March we talked to Wichert Akkerman about Debian using this scheme. He pushed for the provide(8) functionality, which I started implementing on the plane to ALS (yes, it's sad when a plane trip is the first time for months that I get a chance to do some solid coding). I hadn't seen the LSB spec. Still haven't actually :-) I'll get around to that sometime... > I haven't tried converting a system to use it, but looking at his design > and the source code this is really cool stuff. <blush> Note that my WWW page has a link to a tarball which contains sample boot scripts (the ones I run). Feel free to try them out. > It might be interesting for folks to look at it and report what they > think. What Richard did is basically what I always wanted to do, > but didn't have time to code. (About the only thing which I think > he hasn't coded was the ability to run boot scripts in parallel to > speed up the boot process, but that adds a lot of complexity.) Actually, parallel booting was available back in March. And it works. The only major development since then has been provide(8). > Alternatively (and probably the better solution), if we think some > people will want to stay with System V init scripts, we can modify > the proposal to make it more simpleinit friendly, while still > allowing a mapper to map things to the old System V numbers for > those people who want to stick with the old System V way of doing > things. Wichert suggested that the existing Debian boot scripts can have calls to need(8) and provide(8) added, with the default installation having symlinks to /bin/true for /sbin/need and /sbin/provide, and then an optional package which replaces these with the real thing. Something I'd like to do to speed up booting (I'm basically seek-limited now) is to have the kernel record a list of blocks it's read in, and then dump that list upon a certain ioctl(2) or some such. The boot scripts could then use this is reorder the list of blocks and write that into a database. Next boot, either init(8) or an early script reads that database and does dummy reads of those blocks. This would eliminate seek time overheads for booting. This would require a kernel hack of course, and I don't know if it would fly. But I could probably trim boot boot process down to a few seconds. Regards, Richard.... Permanent: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Current: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
