October 14th, 2005
parallel boot
Couriousous, one of the MDV contributors, has written an interesting parallel boot system for MDV which is much less radical than other similar systems. It needs a bit of manual patching of initscripts and so forth in its current pre-alpha state, but I had some spare time so I thought I’d give it a go. The results are interesting – it works perfectly but only saves me 4 seconds, indicating that current startup is already pretty well optimized. The resulting bootchart (below) is almost completely I/O bound, and the only downtime is I think while it’s waiting to see if I’ll press ‘I’ for interactive boot. Interesting stuff. 42 secs isn’t a bad startup time for a full desktop system with email and web server thrown in for good measure!
