well… i don’t know if i’ve blogged this – but the other day i decided to see what would happen if all my startup items were done in parallel. Being the lazy guy that I am, i decided to just edit the rc script and add a & to the startup function.
Believe it or not, this actually worked!
Yes… things started up in parallel. Granted, because of the way debian prints things out it looked ugly… but everything worked. Now, to find some time to play with it some more and get GDM up first so we can log in while everything else loads.
It’s part of my “i really don’t need postgresql, squid, rsync, smartmontools, ssh, apache and cups loaded before i start the login process.”
Things should be dynamic and cope with services, networks etc starting/stopping/restarting.
Besides… you can always have a “login requirements” list or something if you really do think that mysqld should be running before you log in.
I noticed that some services relied on others to start on my debian system. I wrote paraserv, a tcl script that starts the required services in tiers, using tclthreads to cause parallel execution per tier. If you’re interested, get it here