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

[Lucas Holt]

On Jun 20, 2012, at 11:43 AM, Daniel Robbins <drobbins at funtoo.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Wojciech Puchar
> <wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> wrote:
>> 
>> Whatever benefits are, and for sure they are think of this:
>> 
>> 1) can it be compatible with 20000 ports already made for FreeBSD, where
>> many of them install rc.d scripts in CURRENT format.
> 
> OK. This will clearly be needed, and shouldn't take too much time to
> investigate.
> 
>> 2) is the problem 1 worth of slight improvement over already good, but
>> certainly not perfect rc.d subsystem.
> 
> Yes, clearly OpenRC will need to offer significant improvements to
> make it worthwhile to justify migrating over to it.
> 
> So let me know if you have any ideas for anything that would be
> considered more than just a slight improvement, that would make you go
> "OK, now it's seriously worth considering OpenRC as this is more than
> just a nominal improvement in functionality."
> 
>> If someone would like to make new ports subsystem from scratch then it would
>> be great. Would you like to ? ;)
> 
> I know you are joking, but in all seriousness, this is another area of
> potential collaboration, because at some point I will be looking to
> significantly improve Portage. And Gentoo and Funtoo have the same
> challenging of upgrading ports systems -- there's so much stuff that
> already uses our *existing* ports system that needs to be moved over.
> There are creative solutions to this problem that I have found. So
> it's a good idea to stay in touch :)
> 
>> when i would have million dollars handy call me and find these 20 people ;)
> 
> I have some ideas that should make it possible to transition ports
> systems with less effort than this. But this isn't related to the
> current thread :)
> 

For one thing, it depends on how different the new ports system is. We migrated MidnightBSD's mports in about a year for roughly 2000 ports with four people, but that was a refactor of FreeBSD ports rather than a whole new system. The biggest problems were related to installing into a fake root as many plists were terribly bad.  There are classes of problems like perl ports or gnu autotools which tend to have common solutions.  In our case, we wanted some compatibility due to the limited resources we had.  Looking at modern FreeBSD, most of the problems have been solved by automated testing and hard work by the ports people. I personally think the problem now is packages. They must be updated and the tools must be better to upgrade. I know several folks are working on it and both midnightbsd and pc-bsd have solutions to look at there as well. 

As far as rc goes, I think it is slow for some setups and reasonable for others. Kernel boot time needs improvement as well as loading kernel modules.  There isn't a one size fits all fix for the boot time problem.  Maybe a bunch of little improvements would help the most folks. rcorder caching or something ?

Luke