It's a tiny statically linked init that besides offering make-like dependencies to load services in parallel also offers ways to avoid spawning a thousand shell and utility processes in the boot process.
On my notebook, it takes less than a second from the start of init to a login prompt. In fact the latency is so small that I have never used the APM or ACPI suspend mode any more, I just turn the notebook off and on again. That's actually faster than the BIOS suspend-to-disk feature.
minit also has other benefits over standard init: you can ask init for the PID of services like sshd without PID files and thus even on read-only media like a CD-ROM without initial RAM disk or shmfs.
It's Linux only, though. And you need the diet libc for full effect (52k memory footprint for init on my desktop, including shared read-only pages).
That's exactly what I wrote minit for (Score:5, Informative)
It's a tiny statically linked init that besides offering make-like dependencies to load services in parallel also offers ways to avoid spawning a thousand shell and utility processes in the boot process.
On my notebook, it takes less than a second from the start of init to a login prompt. In fact the latency is so small that I have never used the APM or ACPI suspend mode any more, I just turn the notebook off and on again. That's actually faster than the BIOS suspend-to-disk feature.
minit also has other benefits over standard init: you can ask init for the PID of services like sshd without PID files and thus even on read-only media like a CD-ROM without initial RAM disk or shmfs.
It's Linux only, though. And you need the diet libc for full effect (52k memory footprint for init on my desktop, including shared read-only pages).