Improve the Debian boot process - blog

For the project to improve debian boot process, I've installed debian woody and debian sarge to see the changes in debian releases. Currently installing debian etch.

The first bootcharts are here for woody and sarge with a clean installation with autologin to kde. Funny to see woody being faster with 32 seconds while sarge has 44 seconds.

For debian woody I had some problems to use bootchart but they were solved thanks to the kind help of Baruch Even. The errors were:

• bootchart requires tmpfs filesystem, while the kernel 2.2 that comes with woody doesn't have tmpfs. It was solved by installing kernel 2.4 and substituting tmpfs with ramfs in the /sbin/bootchartd script.
  

• initrd ignores the kernel call to bootchartd, as it ignores the arguments given to the kernel. It was solved by renaming /sbin/init (e.g. /sbin/init-moved) and making the file /sbin/init link to /sbin/bootchartd. At the end of the latter, there renamed /sbin/init is called. It's perhaps an ugly tweak but worked for our means.
  

On the other hand, the first deliverable draft was added to the svn repository and is available for comments here. It is still on an early phase and needs to be converted from tex to html.

Finally, I'm checking out SUSE's implementation of startpar together with insserv for parallel execution. It is interesting to see a boot process that looks to be already LSB-compliant.