#4349 HIGH Future : Improve startup speed

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#4349: Improve startup speed
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  Reporter:  wmb at firmworks.com  |       Owner:  cscott        
      Type:  enhancement        |      Status:  new           
  Priority:  high               |   Milestone:  Future Release
 Component:  distro             |     Version:                
Resolution:                     |    Keywords:                
  Verified:  0                  |  
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Comment(by wmb at firmworks.com):

 The key to improving initscript time is to improve initscript time,
 whatever it takes.

 Don't be tempted to assume that a lot of parallelism is actually available
 on XO. XO often bottlenecks on CPU cycles (for starting, parsing and
 running scripts), and on JFFS2 NAND accesses, which often cannot be
 effectively overlapped with other operations due to the lack of scatter-
 gather DMA and the need to uncompress the data nodes.  Apart from network
 operations like waiting for DHCP responses, the OLPC I/O system does not
 have a lot of available parallelism.

 Getting to a short startup time will require aggressive elimination of
 unnecessary operations, appropriate use of parallelism in the limited
 cases where it is actually available, and possible deferral of startup
 steps that don't have to happen immediately.

 This is a limited-scope system in its primary target configuration, and as
 such, elimination of stuff like NFS is fair game, at least for the stock
 configuration.

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Ticket URL: <https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4349#comment:9>
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