[Nix-dev] /etc boot-time optimizations

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Eelco Dolstra <e.dolstra at tudelft.nl>
writes:

> I just rebooted and this broke my system

Ouch.  I just booted today in the system that uses this mechanism, and
it seemed to work fine so far.

> Further, *generating two C programs to update /etc* seems absolute overkill, and
> doesn't improve the maintainability of the code.

+1

> (I never really noticed the /etc update being a major bottleneck...)

I’m dubious as well.  Looking at the boot sequence, it seems that a lot
of time is spent elsewhere (initializing drivers, starting Upstart jobs,
etc.)

Perhaps we should enable timestamps at the beginning of console output
lines, like some other distros do.  What does it take to do it?

> Since the main overhead is probably in forking, using a bit of Perl
> seems a simpler solution.

Yes.  I think symlink dereferencing takes a lot of time too...

> What is kill-etc supposed to do?

I find the name non-descriptive, too.

Thanks,
Ludo’.