Gentoo Archives: gentoo-soc

From: Makassikis Marios <mmakassikis@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-soc@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-soc] Greetings
Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:37:08
Message-Id: q2k9cc5fdd31004071236mb44da79bo1fd8a508ca666217@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-soc] Greetings by "Petteri Räty"
1 >
2 > There's some pitfalls for students in writing something like Ebuild
3 > Generator. Understanding the needs of the users goes a long a way
4 > towards making a project successful. It can be quite hard to step into
5 > the shoes of someone who has written ebuilds for many years if you have
6 > no experience in ebuild writing. At least an involved mentor is needed.
7 > Not impossible of course but the application would need to detail how
8 > the generator will work to clearly show that there's benefit in writing one.
9 >
10
11 This actually makes perfect sense. It may prove to be a difficult task since
12 I have very little experience with Gentoo.
13
14 On a completely unrelated note, today I discovered quick-init
15 (http://www.obliquo.net/?articles/quick-init.html) which modifies the
16 boot sequence
17 to speed it up. This application does not target Gentoo. It was
18 specifically written for
19 Arch Linux, which I am running alongside Gentoo. I was curious to see
20 what results
21 would be achieved and I was pleasantly surprised:
22 Using the default kernel, I measured boot time using bootchart, which
23 announced 40s
24 to get from GRUB to tty and type 'startx' (which started X with the
25 OpenBox WM - no
26 fancy KDE/Gnome).
27 After installing the above mentioned application, I redid the measure,
28 only to discover
29 I was down to 15s ! (Test machine is a netbook with a regular HDD). I
30 checked Arch's
31 forums and it seems several people get these results although there
32 are some problems.
33
34 This made me think of the project to reduce boot times that is the
35 wiki page, and as such
36 I wonder if it would be a good idea to adapt the application for
37 Gentoo, and fix known issues.
38
39 I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.
40
41 Regards,
42
43 Marios