Time for a new Linux

[Michael Galea]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org [mailto:cbbrowne at acm.org]
> Sent: Saturday, November 08, 2003 2:09 PM
> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Time for a new Linux 
> 
> 
> > I happen to like run levels but that is because I cut my 
> Unix teeth on 
> > Interactive Unix, not because of any strong religious 
> beliefs about it. 
> > What is better about BSD style init?
> 
> It does feel a bit more "unixy" by virtue of running as scripts; the
> "SysV way" is vaguely more "mainframe-like."  That being 
> said, I prefer
> the present use of the SysV approach.
> 
> Mind you, the notion of "runlevels" is a lot less useful than 
> it used to
> be.  It's sensible enough to have a "single user mode" for really
> oddball setup issues, but the differences between levels 2, 
> 3, 4, and 5
> are pretty irrelevant save on big multiuser boxes, and in those cases,
> you don't change runlevels much because you'd get tarred and feathered
> by the users.
> 
> What I would like to see is something more along the lines of a
> "makefile-based Init," where you define what services depend on what
> other services, and can basically run "make" to get everything started
> up in suitable order.
> 
> The cool "next step" would be to run "make -j 20" which (with 
> GNU Make)
> would spawn as many as 20 services concurrently, which should speed up
> system startup a fair bit over the present approach which 
> serializes the
> startup.
> 
> That would be more like something of a conglomeration of BSD and SysV
> init approaches...
> --
> If this was helpful, 

Hi Chris, there is an article on "makefile based init" in the IBM 
developerWorks Sept issue entitled, "Boot Linux faster - 
Parallelize Linux system services to improve boot speed".  Its
what you suggest, only the rub is that you have to evaluate the
task dependencies beforehand.
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