How systemd improves system startup efficiency

Presenter: Mayur Nande
MontaVista Software

Abstract

Linux distributions have been struggling for several years with boot time and efficient management of the system services.

For enterprise distributions, from powerup to complete initialization can take several minutes. On the other end of the spectrum, laptops are expected to boot fast: the sooner the better (may be less than 10 seconds?). Moreover, after the system comes up, a good session manager is needed, which baby-sits the processes and handles errors in an efficient way.

After several attempts at improving init scripts and custom launchers (uxlaunch and upstart), Lennart Poettering and Kai Sievers co-designed and authored a new daemon that will replace the existing init systems. This is going to be used in Fedora 15 and the successor of Opensuse 11.4.

Systemd is a framework for expressing services' dependencies. It allows more work to be done in parallel at system startup and reduces shell overhead (init). This can result in faster boot times and better session management. Mayur will explain the current Linux system init, look at alternative solutions and then dive deep into systemd operation. The talk will take you through the basics of systemd. It would touch upon how the parallelization of Socket Services, Bus Services and file system jobs results in an efficient init system, which is much cleaner and easy to debug.

The talk will include a discussion of how systemd can also act as a good session-manager and list its future plans.

Bio

Mayur Nande works for MontaVista Software, a subsidiary of Cavium Networks. He is currently engaged in a job on-site at a big German car parts manufacturer where he aids the introduction of Linux. Mayur holds a Masters degree in Embedded systems from BITS PILANI and a bachelors degree in Electronics from University in Mumbai. Since 2005 he has been helping customers understanding the use of Linux in embedded products.