speeding up sysvinit boot on Jessie

[Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org>]

I set up a Jessie VM (kvm: 1 cpu, 512MB RAM, qemu2 filesystem)
to take a look at what is coming down the road.

The default install with systemd as init boots very quickly.

When I changed to sysvinit, boot times ended up around 32
seconds, and sometimes 47.

Most of this time seemed to be taken up by udev. By default,
it has no configuration for logging.

Changing /etc/udev/udev.conf to log errors:
udev_log="err"

and updating the initramfs:
update-initramfs -k all -u

gives sysvinit a boot time of 1.42 seconds.


jessietest:/home/dsr# pstree
init─┬─acpid
     ├─atd
     ├─chef-client───{ruby-timer-thr}
     ├─cron
     ├─exim4
     ├─6*[getty]
     ├─rpc.idmapd
     ├─rpc.statd
     ├─rpcbind
     ├─rsyslogd─┬─{in:imklog}
     │          ├─{in:imuxsock}
     │          └─{rs:main Q:Reg}
     ├─sshd───sshd───sshd───bash───sudo───bash───pstree
     └─udevd

That might be helpful.

-dsr-