Moving the old forward. init's and stuff

[CwF]

I've come up with non-issue init question I not only don't know but also have no indication to even have a preference on.

After freshening up some vm base images I noticed a delay on startup that isn't always the image, could be the greater system, or what was that past issue with haveged? So off on a tangent we go...

I remember a generation or so back installing haveged (or rng-tools?) helped out. Maybe just wiggle the mouse! I'm wondering now if it is still needed? One very tight image is a i686 vm and it does not have haveged, or a logon manager, uses systemd with auto login, and is slow.

A fatter (dark fat) AMD64 competitor has it, and an autolog LightDM and starts up in half the time (~4 seconds). The i686 can logoff and on to refresh a session in a few seconds, it's just the first start that adds 3-4 seconds, for what?

So I start digging into start up time and reviewing my various examples. Sure systemd-analyze and blame gives me numbers, but I've learned benchmarks from within vm's lie. Their clock can literally pause, mine keeps going. I then get on to a few init differences...

My old reliable AMD64 is a Jessie now Bullseye and has haveged, but also sysv-rc, and startpar, and is consistently the fastest. As mentioned my 'newest' is the i686, a Stretch now Bullseye, has none of that. To refresh my memory I find removing sysv-rc insist on installing openrc. Sure seems fine, but the i686 has no openrc either.

So now my hole in knowledge = if sysv-rc replaces openrc, or openrc replaces sysv-rc, what replaces BOTH. I know a vague answer is 'systemd'. But I see no path to do that?

...after that, back to what's faster! So far, slimmer is slower.

[Bulkley]

Have you tried Runit? I've looked at s6 and been thoroughly spooked. I have yet to read that anyone has made Debian boot with s6.

A few years back I ran Stretch with Openrc as my daily driver. Installing Openrc was as simple as apt-get install openrc and reboot. We can't do that as easily anymore although it looks to be better with Bullseye than buster. Back then systemd-shim helped make it all work. (MX has an updated systemd-shim but installing that pretty much ties one to the MX repository forever. One could install MX which is an excellent option.)

[CwF]

Have you tried Runit? I've looked at s6

Those are still on top of sysv-rc.
I have not identified what the i686 has that substitutes both sysv-rc and openrc, or the primary dependency insserv. Something buried in systemd. I suppose the startpar package is the AMD64's startup advantage..

[Bulkley]

Have you tried Runit? I've looked at s6

Those are still on top of sysv-rc.

A while back I built a Bullseye VM using runit with runit-init. I just ran up a VM of Antix-Bullseye-A2-runit_x64-full 11. It uses a long string of runit- stuff, some of which are in-house configs, but no sysv-rc.

[Prowler_Gr]

I've looked at s6 and been thoroughly spooked. I have yet to read that anyone has made Debian boot with s6.

It's all changing

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic ... ost-130034
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/2 ... 82.en.html

[trinidad]

http://skarnet.org/software/s6/

Haven't tried it but it seems available for Devuan Daedalus so I may give it whirl this year. Concepts seem to make a lot of sense.

TC