init observations

[Dimi Paun]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 17:05 +1100, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> In my experience, the faster boot of Windows is just a bit of slight
> of hand.

That's fine -- users (for whatever reasons that are not worth
debating), like that behavior. I think we'd do better if we
could start X faster, while other things are going on in the
background. (For fun, look at the first item on this page that
I have just stumbled across: http://kegel.com/linux/comfort/ ).

Going back to X, for a normal Linux install (no networked /home),
what do we _really_ need to start X? We need:
  * The files. These we typically have on the HD that the
    kernel booted from, so no additional time is needed.
  * Video card. This is mostly there.

Everything else (including mouse and keyboard) can come later.
We should be able to bring X up well within 5 seconds. And if
we do bring it up fast enough, we can also drop the rhgb and
speed it up even more.

To do this right we need a proper API for services, one that
can be called from code to start/stop/wait_for/... a service.

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.