Re: Requests for FC4

[Stuart Children <stuart terminus co uk>]

Hiya

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Stuart Children (stuart terminus co uk) said: 
>
> > > Exactly... what needs to be done here is tagging of all the 
> > > scripts/services
> > > that can be shut down cleanly, then some quick changes to /etc/rc should
> > > cut about half the time out of shutdown (based on some tests I ran ~10
> > > months ago or so.)
> >
> > How about a "prepare-for-system-shutdown" [1] command to the rc scripts? 
> > With the meaning of "save anything you need to 'cos the system's going 
> > down shortly" rather than "i want you to exit all your processes right 
> > now" (the 'stop' command). For most services this could just be a NOP. 
> > Others could trivially call their 'stop' command, or do whatever subset 
> > of that is necessary.
> >
> > [1] a more succient name should obviously be used. :) Actually, how 
> > about 'save', and 'stop' could in general call that and then do its 
> > killings?
>
>
> Breaks compatibility with third-party scripts.

How do you mean... you're only adding new functionality. Is the problem 
that third-party scripts wouldn't have a 'save' command? If so then you 
check the exit value of the script, and if it's 1 then retry with 
'stop'. Again, you start to lose some of the time savings then, but this 
should not be the common case, and would improve as people updated their 
scripts.

Obviously if this were implemented it would make sense to get upstream 
init scripts to adopt the new command. I'm sure other distributions 
would appreciate it too.

Anyway - whether this is used or another method - I think it's important 
that the application/package can say "I do [not] need do to anything 
before system-shutdown", rather than having a list somewhere of what 
things we think are safe to skip shutdown on that is 1) potentially 
obscured and 2) requires being kept up to date. Having services called 
"httpd" doesn't help avoid problems here either - perhaps apache can be 
safely left running, but my database-based webserver needs to write 
stuff to disk... but that's another rant. :)

Cheers

--
Stuart Children