What Upstart is not

Posted Apr 11, 2010 12:04 UTC (Sun) by sladen (guest, #27402)
In reply to: Ubuntu's Success Story: the Upstart Startup Manager (LinuxPlanet) by rilder
Parent article: Ubuntu's Success Story: the Upstart Startup Manager (LinuxPlanet)

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.