Comment Re:why? (Score 3, Insightful) 311
It's not a long stretch to imagine that you can start a userspace process long before all of the kernel drivers are initialized. It's basically a big waste of time that the kernel delays starting init to *after* all the drivers are initialized. It's a waste of time. The applications that depend on functionality of certain parts of the kernel should simply wait until those parts become available. That's all there's to it. Also, the drivers can be initialized in parallel. No reason for the network card driver initialization not to run in parallel with waiting for the scsi raid driver to come up. The console doesn't need any of that and can be started up as the first thing, even if it were a userspace driver. Kernel usually starts off an initrd image, that's where the console application would be. I think it'd be wonderful if the kernel went in this direction, not only for console but for all other drivers as well. The applications that need to wait for certain things can get notifications when drivers get ready.