“X is still problematic. We had to do a lot of damage to X, Arjan said.”

Wonder what the affects are of that “damage”?

So, I guess you should move to writing at planet XFCE instead of planet gnome? I doubt they had done it with gdm+gnome. Sine gnome is one of the flag bearers of the “lets create slow starting daemons and frameworks” culture..

I’d say the Next New Shiny Thing approach has been the problem more often than not.

Adam: I’m aware that all the distro people have spent a lot of time to come up with solutions for all the weird daemons/systems that can be installed, and they did great work.
And I’m well aware that Arjan’s code is at the sweet spot of the 80/20 rule. But he did 100% of the mindset work.

http://blog.crozat.net/2008/09/improving-boot-time-on-general-linux.html

otte: well, for a start, he kills initrd and sticks all modules in the kernel. Which is what we used to do in 2001. There’s good reasons for going with initrd. The fact that he can get away with it on one very basic laptop doesn’t mean we can just ditch initrd. Yes, he suggests trying a big-ass kernel and falling back to initrd if it doesn’t work, but that’s an untested compromise that adds substantial complexity.

Then he uses a static /dev tree, with udev only added on top later. I am sure he has not really tested the consequences of this in a general operating environment.

Basically, what he does is cut out all sorts of shit which is, granted, not used by the most basic possible scenario (a very simple-use, single-user laptop with local authentication and not much hardware) but *is* used in plenty of other situations. And then he says “what we should do is use this extremely minimalistic system by default and try and dynamically bolt on all the other bits if they prove useful”.

Which is basically doing the easy work and grabbing the headlines, and leaving the tough work to others. It’s all very well to say “oh, yeah, we can just glue in things like network authentication if they’re needed on the system in question”, but…how? Has he done it? Has he researched how to do it? Has he looked at whether it would introduce regressions on those systems that need it?

No.

What he’s done is optimized an incredibly simple case and said “Look, it’s fast!”. Which Gentoo people have been doing for years.

It’s useful in that it shows a simple scenario can boot that fast. Great. But that’s just the opening act. There’s a ton more work to do before it can actually be useful in a general purpose distro. You can’t just sit back and say “well, look, he solved the problem, what have all you other chumps been doing for years?”

I would expect to install a “Sony-Vaio-Tz-optimization.deb” and get maximum performance.

So speak up to the hardware vendors to provide something like this.

You see, for user it doesn’t mean when the components get started. Only thing that matters is that the things that he needs are ready when he needs them. Take a look at what absolute crap the normal Linux startup sequence does! Yes, most of that is really important and required, but the question is WHEN. The answer is: Later.

My problem with this is that it’s a factor of roughly ten. Arjan’s boot is 10x faster than a normal boot. That is a landslide. Had he only been 2x faster, ok. 4x would have raised my eyebrows to considerable heights. But this is 10x faster. I know he tuned it for the EEE and did a lot of other “dirty” tricks, but there is no reason why the installer couldn’t do the same tricks and tune my system to run this fast. At least I’m not seeing them.