« VW Electronics Research Lab | Main | The R-Drive »
May 22, 2005
EPIA System Init
I think I've decided that when the Mini-ITX was together the boot time was way too long. The actual kernel boot was very quick, but when Gentoo [gentoo.org] probed for devices and loaded daemons it did it serially. Normally serial loads aren't bad, but these types of loads are I/O intensive. So, there's lots of CPU-spinning time where nothing useful is being accomplished.
To alleviate this problem I found this new init system, Initng [dyndns.org]. From the website:
Initng is a full replacement of the old and in many ways depricated sysvinit tool. It is designed with speed in mind, doing as much as possible asynchronously.In other words: It will boot your unix-system much faster, and give you more control and statistics over your system.
Sounds too good to be true. However, the author did run some comparisons that (on the surface) look reputable.
Notice that total boottime when from 41secs to only 17secs, loading same services! Also watch the nice hardrive troughput and utilization, not mutch io-wait here.
When the system is back to its original goodness, I'll try and report back.
Posted by Guy at May 22, 2005 08:17 PM