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user

Member

Registered: 2020-04-26

Posts: 3  

Boot time with Beowulf and SysVInit

I quickly searched the forum and didn't see other recent comments on that so I'll make a new post: I'm very happy about the shorter boot time with Devuan. A minimal VM boots in less than 4 seconds (if I use static IP; open-vm-tools didn't make much difference either way - as far as I can tell it doesn't visibly extend or shorten boot time - but I install it for better manageability).
DHCP IPs do add several seconds and double boot time to close to 10 seconds, which is somewhat surprising because I expected on second boot the same address would be obtained. Later I realized it's not DHCP per se, but if open-vm-tools are installed, ethtool is installed as well, and that's what starts adding to boot time even after open-vm-tools is removed. If I remove ethtool, boot time remains fast (with a tiny bit added due to open-vm-tools). Edit: boot time difference vs systemd distros isn't huge or even quantified (I had problems finding tools that measure that for SysVInit so I looked at dmesg output), but it feels slighly faster and I install and reboot OS a lot so I like that.

I haven't used Devuan before so I  was looking for a skinny on SysVInit but it wasn't easy to find. Arch Linux has a pretty good page but it's no longer maintained because they have moved to systemd. Gentoo's is very dense and developer-oriented. Fedora (not listed) has a cheatsheet which can be used in reverse, but sadly it seems to not apply to Debian-like distros).
Considering that SysVInit (and other alternatives available in Devuan) are the main distinguishing characteristic of Devuan among Debian-like distros, SysVInit how-to's or at least the basics, should be easily available.

[1] https://devuan.org/os/documentation/faq/
[2] https://friendsofdevuan.org/doku.php/de … wtos:start
[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SysVinit
[4] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Sysvinit

Last edited by user (2020-04-26 03:10:33)

stevendemetrius

Member

Registered: 2018-06-22

Posts: 9  

Re: Boot time with Beowulf and SysVInit

Out of curiosity, what is the justification of the seemingly wide-spread obsession with reducing boot time below its current average levels. Which in my experience with Devuan is a few minutes using multiple fully encrypted disks/drives and partitions, and KDE desktop. If I use a vanilla install I don't even notice the boot-time.

If one wants to reduce boot time below the current levels, a few seconds to a few minutes, just-because, then I can understand that. What I don't understand is the portrayed practical need to do so.

The only thing I can think of is for enterprise deployment, in which case having redundant servers and server clusters with distributed storage is the logical way to go.