Speeding up the boot process.

Raise your hand if you think Linux is slow to boot. That's right folks there are not many who didnt raise their hand. I'm pretty satisfied with Linspire and other Linux OS's for home and server tasks. However the boot times range from 2-5 minutes just to get to a graphical prompt. Sure trimming a Kernel down to necessary things can speed them up in todays and future kernels this may limit your system's ability to work as a plug and play system or even updates. Not to mention that if you had to update it's a lengthy recompile.

IBM has worked on loading services and drivers/devices in a manner that loads a root device/service and then all dependent services at the same time. Basically you could consider example below.

Network: Loading
Network: Loaded Loading Dependent Services
SSHD, NFS, SMBCLIENT: Loading
Network Dependent Services Loaded

A total of 4 services were loaded. In a normal system each would be loaded and would take a average of 10 seconds a peice to load. In a parallel loading matrix you can reduce the time to 20 seconds for a 50% savings on loading those services.

So far I have yet to see this in pratice on any Linux distro. Hopefully I'll be able to implement it on Linspire and if it works well enough other distros will catch on.

Wish me luck!