Boot time tuning chapter 5th: Timing

Hi everybody,

as promised I'm here again with another chapter about boot tuning. Last time I made a little step back to improve my system reliability, today I'm moving forth again, with no renounce of course!

The solution I was trying it is very customizable, but I'm going to explain as well as I can how can you achieve the same degree of optimization on your box. Our requisites are a text editor, bootchart and if you are running gentoo we will use eselect tool. If you don't have bootchart you can find a guide how to install it here or googling around.

As always I suggest you to give up if you don't know what you're doing, unless you try it on a "testbox". I don't take liability of any consequence.

Boot time tuning chapter second: OpenRC

Yesterday we saw how to install bootchart and understand what's in its report image. Today we are going to make a small step for a user but a big step for your box: install OpenRC.

Your box works with baselayout1:

"Originally Gentoo's rc system was built into baselayout 1 and written entirely in bash. This led to several limitations. For example, certain system calls need to be accessed during boot and this required C-based callouts to be added. These callouts were each statically linked, causing the rc system to bloat over time. [...] This led to a development of baselayout 2, which is written in C and only requires a POSIX-compliant shell. During the development of baselayout 2, it was determined that it was a better fit if baselayout merely provided the base files and filesystem layout for Gentoo and the rc system was broken off into its own package. Thus we have OpenRC.

OpenRC is primarily developed by Roy Marples and supports all current Gentoo variations (i.e. Gentoo Linux, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Gentoo Embedded, and Gentoo Vserver) and other platforms such as FreeBSD and NetBSD." Taken from Gentoo Handbook