FreeBSD Boot Times

[Nathan Whitehorn]

Thanks for the information -- I got scared by "SysV init". This actually 
does look very nice.
-Nathan

On 06/13/12 13:35, Richard Yao wrote:
> The OpenRC is sysvinit compatible, but it has few of sysvinit's flaws.
> It has named runlevels, the presence of an init script does not cause it
> to start and it is in my opinion a joy to use.
>
> I suggest that you try OpenRC before drawing conclusions. You can
> install Gentoo FreeBSD in a jail. There are instructions for this on the
> Gentoo wiki:
>
> http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD#Howto_run_G.2FFBSD_in_vanilla_FreeBSD.27s_jail
>
> If you find deficiencies, I am certain that the OpenRC developers would
> appreciate feedback regarding them.
>
> On 06/13/12 10:19, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> 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 at 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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