LWN: Comments on "Fedora: an example of community involvement"

Fedora: an example of community involvement

niner — 2004-11-26T20:29:31+00:00

I'm a little bit surprised. I know that at least on SuSE exactly this is done. Init scripts have priorities inidcated by the number between S and the scriptname in the runlevel link. These numbers are calculated through dependencies given by special comments in the init scripts themselves and all scripts with the same priority are started in parallel. So this is already implemented and even standardized in the Linux Standards Base: http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_2.0.1/LSB-Core/LSB-...

Are there distros out there that do not already behave this way?

46s is still far too slow

renox — 2004-11-26T18:50:33+00:00

With BeOS, from the moment the BIOS initialisation finish to a usable graphical desktop, it took under 20s (more like 14s if memory serves) on a Celeron333 with 128MB of RAM.

To have the equivalent under Linux, you would have to measure: kernel boot + KDE or Gnome startup with auto-login.
If I'm not mistaken 46s only take into account the kernel boot time on a 1.5GHz PentiumM!
This may be be partly caused by a slow disk (the PentiumM makes me think that it is a portable which have usually slow disks), but still this is very slow..

For gentoo users

paulpach — 2004-11-25T15:05:49+00:00

I have made a few patches for gentoo that decrease boot time. The most important ones are Avoiding unneded work, Making parallel startup trully parallel, and Starting X as soon as posible

I am currently porting Ziga's scripts for gentoo.

Fedora: an example of community involvement

gowen — 2004-11-25T10:54:46+00:00

D'oh! That should, of course, read:

The Linux Kernel, after more than ten years, has not become a "community" project by any means. It is centrally controlled, and many crucial decisions seem to come from some sort of smoke-filled room at Linus Torvalds' house.

Fedora: an example of community involvement

gowen — 2004-11-25T10:53:47+00:00

I find the contents of the opening paragraph peculiar. Would anyone at LWN ever consider writing :

The Fedora Project, after more than one year, has not become a "community" project by any means. It is centrally controlled, and many crucial decisions seem to come from some sort of smoke-filled room at Linus Torvalds' house.

Fedora: an example of community involvement

forthy — 2004-11-25T09:35:06+00:00

One culprit of long boot time is init, which starts processes
sequentially. On the last LinuxTag, a guy next to me in the bar BQ queue
told me that he had changed init to run all the setup scripts of one
run-level in parallel, and reported a very significant speed-up in boot
time. It's probably not an universal solution, since run levels are not
necessary dependency graphs, but creating such a dependency graph and
executing it as parallel as possible should help (or at least start all
S<n> scripts with equal n in parallel).

Fedora: an example of community involvement

zeega — 2004-11-24T23:44:56+00:00

The bootchart script and source code are now available on SourceForge, so if people want to give it a try, visit:
http://www.klika.si/ziga/bootchart/

I'd like to include boot charts from various GNU/Linux distributions on the web site (Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.). Each may require minor modifications of the init script though, so let me know if you have any questions.

--
Ziga

Fedora: an example of community involvement

dcoutts — 2004-11-19T13:58:00+00:00

It was not obviously a busy loop. It's a problem with properly understanding the wierd semantics of FIFO's. Apparently if a FIFO has no writers and a reader is poll()ing/select()ing on it, the semantics is that instead of blocking until a writer connects to the FIFO and writes something, the kernel sends the reader process sig HUP every time it poll()s. So the reader ends up spinning bussily.

Conclusion FIFO's are wierd and best avoided in favour of unix domain sockets.

Fedora: an example of community involvement

jvoss2 — 2004-11-19T12:55:20+00:00

I did :-) The result is not as beautiful as Ziga's, but it might be useful nevertheless. You can find it at my Boot Process of a Debian System web page.

I hope this helps,
Jochen

Fedora: an example of community involvement

stuart2048 — 2004-11-18T20:13:16+00:00

Hmm, what sort of award should we propose for the chap who stuck a busy loop in rhgb in the first place?

Fedora: an example of community involvement

tpo — 2004-11-18T19:54:12+00:00

Anybody tried this (logging the boot) with Debian?
*t

Fedora: an example of community involvement

smoogen — 2004-11-18T19:12:10+00:00

Thanks for saying this seth. I am having to make a decision soon for my own enviroment, and hearing things from people who have taken RH to task is clarifying if I should stick with RH.

Fedora: an example of community involvement

bronson — 2004-11-18T16:23:07+00:00

This is a pleasing and immediately understandable chart. Tufte would be proud. If I had some sort of Linux award to offer, Ziga Mahkovec would receive it for showing ineguity and motivation in an area that has languished for years. And Owen Taylor would get an honorable mention.

Fedora: an example of community involvement

khim — 2004-11-18T13:45:18+00:00

Exactly. To be frank once I've tries Fedora Core 1 I've been so disappointed I've switched to Gentoo and never recommended Fecora Core to anyone.

Recently I've tried Fedora Core 3 and I actualy liked it! I myself will stick with Gentoo but if user does not like to recompile everything every day the Fedora looks like good choice now.

Fedora: an example of community involvement

NRArnot — 2004-11-18T10:23:24+00:00

It's been observed that the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship, but that no means has ever been found to keep the dictator benevolent.

In the case of a linux distribution, that problem isn't a serious one. If Redhat is able to continue to provide benevolent dictatorship of this project, it will continue to flourish. If not, there are plenty of other distributions to defect to, and the sources as well.

Fedora: an example of community involvement

skvidal — 2004-11-18T07:53:13+00:00

In addition fedora extras cvs repo is in use by at least 5-6 non-red hat employed contributors. There is much progress being made, especially with CVS. When the official public announcement will be is in anyone's guess.

However, as I have been one of the most vocal critics of fedora's fitful growth into a community project I think I'm in a good position to say that things are getting much better. They're not great but I think it's on a much better track than it was. I'm looking forward to more development time on FC4 and a number of side projects related to FC4.

-sv

Fedora: an example of community involvement

hp — 2004-11-18T05:36:54+00:00

The public source repo is basically in beta test now with a number of external people involved in that.