Re: initng

[Helge Hafting <helge.hafting@aitel.hist.no>]

Alex Samad wrote:
> Hi
>
> I was just reading an article on slashdot about ubunto and sysvinit. in it, it 
> mentioned about replacement init's one being initng (called prominent).
>
> I was wondering if people of the list were using it.  Will it solve my 
> udev/ldap (libnss-ldap) start up problems. Is it worth the effort to change ?
>   
Initng isn't about solving problems - it is about starting up faster.
sysvinit do one job at a time, and start one service at a time.

Initng do such sequencing only when one operation depends on another.
(I.e. you must mount the filesystems before starting services and so on)

Things that don't depend on each other all starts in parallel. That is much
faster, because:
* multiple processors or dual-cores are used, if you have them.
* Starting up something normally involves several disk accesses where
  the process just waits. This waiting time can now be utilized by other
  processes starting - even on a single-core machine.

You can boot up in 30s or so - more if your bios wastes lots of time
before loading the kernel. Even less time if you don't use X.

As for your udev/ldap problems - please tell what these problems are
if you want help with them.

I have had one recurring problem with ldap&nss - various processes
look up the user id 0 (name: root) before ldap is started. That fails.
Possibly the same problem with other daemons that must run before ldap and
under a username of its own.
The simple fix for this is to set up nsswitch.conf to try both the old
passwd file, and then ldap lookup.  You can then have a small /etc/passwd
file that have "root" and a few other system accounts.

Initial lookup of every name in a *small* /etc/passwd file will not be a 
performance problem.


Helge Hafting