Replacing rc(8) (Was: FreeBSD Boot Times)

[Richard Yao]

On 06/18/2012 06:53 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
> It's unfortunate that this thread evolved into a discussion about
> replacing rc.d, since that's almost certainly not relevant to the
> original topic of improving the overall boot time.
> 
> If you analyze the boot process thoroughly you should see that out of
> the total time taken to boot, nearly 0 is spent by rc.d actually doing
> something. Almost all of the actual time is spent waiting for other
> stuff, either the kernel (primarily) or the services that the system is
> running actually starting up.
> 
> The latter item is the only place where making changes to rc.d is going
> to help, and only then by parellelizing, and even then you are not
> really going to gain much since most things at boot time are serial.
> 
> So while talk of how to get your favorite boot-time manager into FreeBSD
> may be entertaining, it's not likely to be productive, and almost
> certainly isn't going to help the goal of actually making the boot time
> faster.
> 
> But, I'm willing to be proven wrong by someone who actually _implements_
> one of these systems and can demonstrate, in a statistically rigorous
> fashion, how much the boot time is improved.
> 
> Doug

Doug, we already have OpenRC implemented. You can install Gentoo FreeBSD
in a jail, install regular FreeBSD in another jail and do your own
performance comparisons. Here are instructions:

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD#Howto_run_G.2FFBSD_in_vanilla_FreeBSD.27s_jail

Is there anything else that you need?