Ubuntu's Success Story: the Upstart Startup Manager (LinuxPlanet)

Posted Apr 9, 2010 17:06 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
In reply to: Ubuntu's Success Story: the Upstart Startup Manager (LinuxPlanet) by kreijack
Parent article: Ubuntu's Success Story: the Upstart Startup Manager (LinuxPlanet)

Has anyone seen an analysis of boot times which goes into detail about how much boot time savings native upstart jobs are actually providing?

If the general purpose distros are all still running upstart in hybrid mode, it makes it difficult for me to get a clear picture of what upstart's boot time savings actually are compared to pure SysV init.

I understand that theoretically the parallel service start up its capable of should reduce boot times. But I haven't seen an analysis which measures that specifically. I'd love a reference if someone has one.

-jef

Ubuntu's Success Story: the Upstart Startup Manager (LinuxPlanet)

Posted Apr 10, 2010 5:35 UTC (Sat) by rilder (guest, #59804) [Link] (2 responses)

There is nothing new(or better) in parallel service startup of upstart. SysV can be(and has been) modified for parallel startup of services.
I have used bootchart before to obtain the booting phase timings.

What Upstart is not

Posted Apr 11, 2010 12:04 UTC (Sun) by sladen (guest, #27402) [Link] (1 responses)

Upstart is not about speed, it is about enabling a distro to boot on modern dynamic hardware setups (eg. the system needs to wait for the correct USB hard disk with the root filesystem to be inserted, rather than just dying).

...and what is "new" is that Upstart is not dependency-based, it is the opposite. You start from nothing, and see where you end up; there is no presumption that you'll end up with a functioning system but Upstart will launch what it can based on the combination of presently available of hardware, functioning network connection(s), and the configured state of system software—all of which may change over time.

What Upstart is not

Posted Apr 17, 2010 8:27 UTC (Sat) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link]

True, but upstart _should_ be about speed. Not exclusively of course, but seeing how most Linux kernels are running on ARM and other tiny embedded hardware, and even Ubuntu, the main user of upstart, is quickly moving towards netbooks and smartphones, it should be completely obvious that boot speed _is_ one of the critical aspects of initialization that needs to be handled.