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Date:      Wed, 13 Jun 2012 09:19:47 -0500
From:      Nathan Whitehorn <nwhitehorn@freebsd.org>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD Boot Times
Message-ID:  <4FD8A183.2020809@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <4FD7CA24.6080405@gentoo.org>
References:  <4FD66F7E.2060404@brandonfa.lk> <71dc991c8d1b4d2c91ff942fc5f8f340@HUBCAS2.cs.stonybrook.edu> <4FD7CA24.6080405@gentoo.org>

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On 06/12/12 18:00, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 06/11/12 18:51, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 3:21 PM, Brandon Falk<bfalk_bsd@brandonfa.lk>  wrote:
>>> Greetings,
>>>
>>> I was just wondering what it is that FreeBSD does that makes it take so long
>>> to boot. Booting into Ubuntu minimal or my own custom Linux distro,
>>> literally takes 0.5-2 seconds to boot up to shell, where FreeBSD takes about
>>> 10-20 seconds. I'm not sure if anything could be parallelized in the boot
>>> process, but Linux somehow manages to do it. The Ubuntu install I do pretty
>>> much consists of a shell and developers tools, but it still has a generic
>>> kernel. There must be some sort of polling done in the FreeBSD boot process
>>> that could be parallelized or eliminated.
>>>
>>> Anyone have any suggestions?
>>>
>>> Note: This isn't really an issue, moreso a curiosity.
>>      The single process nature of rc is a big part of the problem, as
>> is the single AP bootup of FreeBSD right before multiuser mode. There
>> are a number of threads that discuss this (look for parallel rc bootup
>> or something like that in the current, hacker, and rc archives -- the
>> most recent discussion was probably 6~9 months ago).
>>      Given past experience, a big part of getting past the parallelized
>> rc mess would be to make services fail/wait gracefully for all their
>> resources to come up before proceeding. It's not easy, but it's
>> possible with enough resources.
>> HTH,
>> -Garrett
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> Gentoo FreeBSD shares OpenRC with Gentoo Linux. OpenRC is a BSD 2-clause
> licensed System V init system replacement that supports parallel boot.
> Its boot performance is competitive with systemd and Ubuntu's upstart.
>
> If FreeBSD's init system is serializing the boot process, it might be
> worthwhile to consider importing OpenRC.
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Please don't change any of the user-facing aspects of the RC system. One 
of the things that brought me (and many others I know) to FreeBSD, 
besides working sound, was having an rc.conf that was easy to configure 
instead of the nightmare that is System V init.
-Nathan



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