frz a écrit :
>
> Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
> kernel and the bash shell?
>
1) The accent was on "... and the tools to rebuild it".

2) You don't have to use Bash necessarily. There are other shells.

Cheers,

Niki

On 2007-09-25, Robby Workman <newsgroups@rlworkman.net> wrote:
> On 2007-09-24, frz <frzd@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
>> kernel and the bash shell?
>
>
> As someone else already mentioned, there's ash (which iirc, is used
> by busybox), and you could certainly drop the most recent ksh release
> in there for a shell that's plenty functional yet still relatively
> light.

I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
(45% is a wild guess).

Anyone with lots of time on their hands want to try this with
Slackware 12.0?

Jim

Jim Diamond a écrit :
>
> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
> (45% is a wild guess).
>
Boot speed seems a popular item in distro reviews. With all respect, but
I've never cared about boot speed, but much more about: what have I got
once my system has finished booting?

Would you choose your girlfriend by how fast she gets out of bed? )

Niki

PS: OK, into bed is another matter...

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:42:05 +0200, Niki Kovacs wrote:

> Jim Diamond a écrit :
>>
>> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
>> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
>> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
>> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
>> (45% is a wild guess).

Hmmmm. Let's investigate, shall we?

(FX: footsteps walking across room away from listener; sounds of laptop
keyboard being tapped; there is the occasional curse and intake of breath;
footsteps walk back towards the listener.)

OK, back again. My ubuntu 7.04 flaptop has /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
and has /bin/bash as well. Can't tell you much about dash from that, "man
dash" pops up the page for "man sh". I can tell you that bash is about
700kB and dash is about 80kB. That order of magnitude difference in size
could conceivably improve boot speed.

> Boot speed seems a popular item in distro reviews. With all respect, but
> I've never cared about boot speed, but much more about: what have I got
> once my system has finished booting?

Put boot speed right there with default colour schemes, choice of default
wallpaper, and number of clickable buttons in the installer, then :-)

> Would you choose your girlfriend by how fast she gets out of bed? )

If it's to make the morning coffee when the alarm rings, absolutely!

Boot speed does make a difference to people who have their flaptops with
them at all times, and who don't like to use suspend/resume too many times
between reboots (let's face it, there's too much flaky ACPI hardware out
there).

Most of the boot delay that I see in my machines is because I haven't
turned off a lot of services that start really slowly. And why do so many
distros run syslogd and klogd at the same time if boot speed (or even
performance) really matters?

On Sep 25, 2:37 am, Niki Kovacs <mic...@mouse.com> wrote:
> frz a écrit :
>
> > Question. How can you have a bootable, coherent system without a
> > kernel and the bash shell?
>
> 1) The accent was on "... and the tools to rebuild it".
>
> 2) You don't have to use Bash necessarily. There are other shells.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Niki

Ok I get it. I saw it as the running kernel and not the source, and
the bash shell as again, the running shell. I know about the other
shells available but, I taught we were being specific on one shell to
incluse in this base install.

Another question; could a bootable system be just the running kernel
and a shell?

* Jim Diamond <Jim.Diamond@spambegoneAcadiaU.ca>:
[ ... ]
> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
> (45% is a wild guess).

Debian and Ubuntu which is derived from it. dash is the Debian Almquist
Shell, a fork of the Almquist Shell (ash) which is also available in
Slackware.

Bash is reportedly slower at script execution than some other POSIX
shells including ash, Ksh, and Zsh.

> Anyone with lots of time on their hands want to try this with
> Slackware 12.0?

Wouldn't work since some Bash-ism exist in Slackware's initscripts.
Particularly, the usage of arrays in the networking scripts.

--
James Michael Fultz <xyzzy@sent.as.invalid>
Remove this part when replying ^^^^^^^^

On 2007-09-26, James Michael Fultz <xyzzy@sent.as.invalid> wrote:
> * Jim Diamond <Jim.Diamond@spambegoneAcadiaU.ca>:
> [ ... ]
>> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
>> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
>> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
>> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
>> (45% is a wild guess).
>
> Debian and Ubuntu which is derived from it. dash is the Debian Almquist
> Shell, a fork of the Almquist Shell (ash) which is also available in
> Slackware.
Thanks for the details.


>> Anyone with lots of time on their hands want to try this with
>> Slackware 12.0?

> Wouldn't work since some Bash-ism exist in Slackware's initscripts.
> Particularly, the usage of arrays in the networking scripts.

In those cases, such scripts should read #! /bin/bash
anyway, since the assumption that "sh" == "bash" is a bug.

But one could run all the posix-compatible scripts with some faster
shell, which still might improve things. (My comments on that in
another reply here.)

Cheers.
Jim

On 2007-09-26, Mark South <mark.south@null.invalid> wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:42:05 +0200, Niki Kovacs wrote:
>
>> Jim Diamond a écrit :

>>> I saw an article somewhere the other day saying some distro (Ubuntu
>>> 7.04 maybe?) has /bin/sh linked to "dash", which is a lightweight
>>> posix-complaint shell. Reportedly by doing this the boot scripts run
>>> enough faster that the overall boot was sped up by some large amount
>>> (45% is a wild guess).
>
> Hmmmm. Let's investigate, shall we?
>
> (FX: footsteps walking across room away from listener; sounds of laptop
> keyboard being tapped; there is the occasional curse
Waiting for it to boot?? :-)

>> Boot speed seems a popular item in distro reviews. With all respect, but
>> I've never cared about boot speed, but much more about: what have I got
>> once my system has finished booting?

> Put boot speed right there with default colour schemes, choice of default
> wallpaper, and number of clickable buttons in the installer, then :-)

>> Would you choose your girlfriend by how fast she gets out of bed? )

This has got to be one of the most bizarre (attempted) analogies I've
seen in a long time.

> Boot speed does make a difference to people who have their flaptops with
> them at all times, and who don't like to use suspend/resume too many times
> between reboots (let's face it, there's too much flaky ACPI hardware out
> there).
On my current laptops I have managed to beat the ACPI issues pretty
much into submission, and so normally I S2R and resume. But every now
and then I have to reboot (I sometimes need to check something out in
another version of Slackware or even (*cough*) another Linux distro,
and running it under VMware doesn't always cut it). So yes, boot may
only be 90 (?) seconds, but 50 would be nicer.

Cheers.
Jim

Mark South wrote:
>
.... snip ...
>
> Ideal boot time? Zero seconds, obviously. How much of your life
> do you think has been spent waiting for systems to boot?

I used to grumble about CP/M boot time, which was largely spent
making a usage map of the disk(s). :-)

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net>


--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On 2007-09-27, CBFalconer wrote:
>> Ideal boot time? Zero seconds, obviously. How much of your life
>> do you think has been spent waiting for systems to boot?

> I used to grumble about CP/M boot time, which was largely spent
> making a usage map of the disk(s). :-)

> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.75 [en] (Win98; U)

How long do your Win98 systems take to boot up? LOL

Fix your non-Netiquette-compliant signature block, win-droid.

Then just bugger off and leave the Linux newsgroups to those who
actually use Linux.


--
"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".