[indiana-discuss] reducing the number of services started at boot time

[Dave Miner]

Ian Murdock wrote:
> Alberto Ruiz wrote:
>> 2007/7/5, elw at stderr.org <mailto:elw at stderr.org> <elw at stderr.org 
>> <mailto:elw at stderr.org>>:
>>     SMF is not overkill for indiana. 
>>
>>     it might be overkill to instantiate quite the number of SMF services
>>     that
>>     a full-blown solaris installation does at first-boot, but SMF itself is
>>     incredibly useful.  ;)
>>
>> I think that a lot of people find SMF frustrating because they think 
>> it's slow due to the prohibitive number of services that Solaris and 
>> Solaris Express boot by default. Maybe we should try to keep as less as 
>> possible services for Indiana? Does that makes sense?
> 
> Is this something we should add to the list, i.e., investigate
> the services started at boot time to determine which aren't
> necessary and can be removed? I haven't noticed a problem
> with speed here aside from the first boot (which does take an
> inordinately long time--what on earth is it doing exactly?).
> 

It's importing all of the xml service manifests from /var/svc/manifest 
into the SMF repository.  The SMF team is working on performance 
improvements there, so you might follow up with them on the plans there 
and see if the community here can help accelerate it.  I'd approach it 
that way, as limiting services usually means limiting functionality. 
The Secure-by-Default project took care of the low-hanging fruit here 
already, IMHO.

Moinak and I have pretty well whittled down the live CD case already, 
which is the one place where it actually matters a lot how much you 
start at boot.

Dave