Red Hat Developing Early Login with gdm

hey writes "Red Hat has been working on early login because, among other reasons, 'If we start GDM sooner, the system will "feel" faster because the user will see a login screen sooner.' Very cool."

Comments

improve overall startup performance using 'make'

[dan_bethe]

An IBM researcher has a sample implementation of a dependency system for standard SysV init scripts. It uses 'make' to provides deps instead of the crude, standard ordering system. Search the article for the word "dependencies" and start reading there toward the bottom if you already know how SysV init works.

Re:Boot times...

[Anonymous Coward]

My Debian system take 55 seconds from power-on to KDM.

die init die

[Hard_Code]

Sys V init scripts are just archaic and are showing their age and preventing more sophisticated forms of startup. Why doesn't RedHat investigate replacing Sys V init with a new, dependency-based, parallelizable startup system like Mac OS initialization system or Seth Nickell's proposed "SystemServices" init system:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4711
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2003/Sep

This could easily be backwards compatible such that there are services defined which are simply one-to-one mappings to scripts. Once it's dependency based, you don't have to worry about assigning hardcoded priorities manually and then writing dock gadgets that tell the user when the services are done "starting". As a user I couldn't care less that the services are done starting. Programmers have a futuristic technology called semaphores that can be used to block until a required dependency is fulfilled. If you want to print, and the print spooler hasn't started, instead of blowing chunks, you just implicitly start it. Magic! Ideally, ALL services would be lazy by default unless specifically told by the user to start up automatically (i.e. ssh server, web server, etc.)

It do speed up boot

[paulatz]

If you read the thread on redhat, you will find out that the early-start gdm can shorten the boot process by a dozen seconds. It is not just feel.

Why? Kudzu.

[benjamindees]

Kudzu, which does hardware detection, is one of the worst offenders. Removing it shaves almost ten seconds off of boot time for me, on a 1Ghz box.

Kudzu is also, however, integral to RedHat's "Stateless Linux" system, which reduces maintenance and increases security by booting from centralized disk images. This process is aided by Kudzu's "on-the-fly" hardware detection.

So it's a tradeoff that RedHat seems willing to make: ease of hardware support for slightly longer boot times. I'm willing to bet many large corporate customers are willing to make the same tradeoff, so long boot times must be "worked around" instead of eliminated.