Initng speeds up Linux boot times / provides service resilancy

One feature I really liked in Solaris 10 was SMF.  It provides a framework using services manifests on the system to automatically respawn services should they die off.  It handles dependencies, restarts, and a single unified command set to configure the system using svcs, svccfg, and svcadm.

Linux looks like they’ve started to integrate some of these features with a modified Init daemon that not only restarts defined services, but improves boot time.  I’m going to be checking Initng out and will post with some further findings.

mike on June 14, 2009 | Filed Under Linux Misc, Linux Utilities

3 Comments

Robert Milkowski  on June 15th, 2009

When SMF was introduced it also improved a boot time especially on systems with more than 1 CPU and relatively fast storage. This is mostly due to the fact that thanks to dependencies some services start in parallel.

Hasse Johansen  on June 15th, 2009

I would take a look at “upstart” instead, as that is was both Ubuntu and Fedora is now using (and also the Palm Pre I heard)

Igor Galić  on June 17th, 2009

The main functionality that’s lacking from all Linux init processes and their replacements is that of starting a daemon with certain capabilities(7) only. Just as SMF does, or rather: can do with privileges(5).
Unfortunately it’s still up to the admin to actually implement it.

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