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systemd's mkosi-initrd Talked Up As Better Alternative To Current Initrd Handling--Phoronix:
Red Hat engineer and systemd developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek presented on Monday at the Linux Plumbers Conference on a new design for inital RAM disks (initrd) making use of the new systemd mkosi-initrd project.
The mkosi-initrd approach paired with systemd system extensions is a fundamental shift from expecting initrd images to be built locally on user systems to something that can be done by distribution vendors with their build system. This can allow for better QA, embracing various modern security features, and more manageable initrd assets. Zbigniew summed up his LPC 2022 talk as:
Distributions ship signed kernels, but initrds are generally built locally. Each machine gets a "unique" initrd, which means they cannot be signed by the distro, the QA process is hard, and development of features for the initrd duplicates work done elsewhere.
Systemd has gained "system extensions" (sysexts, runtime additions to the root file system), and "credentials" (secure storage of secrets bound to a TPM). Together, those features can be used to provide signed initrds built by the distro, like the kernel. Sysexts and credentials provide a mechanism for local extensibility: kernel-commandline configuration, secrets for authentication during emergency logins, additional functionality to be included in the initrd, e.g. an sshd server, other tweaks and customizations.
Mkosi-initrd is a project to build such initrds directly from distribution rpms (with support for dm-verity, signatures, sysexts). We think that such an approach will be more maintainable than the current approaches using dracut/mkinitcpio/mkinitramfs. (It also assumes we use systemd to the full extent in the initrd.)
See the talk or go look at the PDF slides.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday September 17 2022, @03:30PM (2 children)
Isn't that part of why Windows has had that start up screen since Windows 95? It hides a bunch of that stuff so that the OS looks more sophisticated than it really is. I do think that the current start up time is completely acceptable. Before I got my new computer, Windows was taking between 10 and 20 minutes to boot up from scratch because I was rebooting rather than shutting it down whenever I wanted to switch over to FreeBSD. It always amazes me that people think that what MS is doing is at all acceptable. (I only had the install because I had a couple Windows only programs that I couldn't ditch)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 18 2022, @02:39AM (1 child)
Any startup time greater than 1.5 seconds is too slow for my taste. My Atari 800 was faster than that.
15 minutes isn't a boot time, it's a dysfunction.
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(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday September 18 2022, @09:18PM
It's dysfunction due to the incompetent way that the boot process is set up. You shouldn't have to wipe the disk and reinstall from scratch because the OS opts to start everything all at once and can't figure out how to prioritize what to start when. And it shouldn't be relying upon cheating by leaving things ready for the next go round, but only if you shutdown rather than reboot. The same computer was able to boot FreeBSD to a usable state in less than a minute.
And yes, it's definitely not acceptable, which is a large part of why I've got the new computer. As far as 1.5 seconds goes, isn't that what hibernate is for? With an SSD, it shouldn't be that much slower than your target.