[ale] compiled system calls versus shell scripts

[Geoffrey]

Christopher Bergeron wrote:

<snip>

> (and make -j) will allow the commands to startup faster than just 
> starting them from a single shell script (as above).

It will as the -j flag will permit you to run some of the scripts in 
parallel.  In your script example you're not taking advantage of 
parallelism, but you could.  It would require using the use of 'wait' 
with the backgrounding of processes.  You example of:

modprobe mousedev
X &

modprobe natsemi
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.x up
sshd &
nfsd &

won't let the network stuff start up until after the mousedev mod is 
available and the network stuff is not dependent on that module, thus 
you could have some parallel effort as follows:

modprobe mousedev &

mousedevpid=$!

(wait $mousedevpid; X & ) &

Xpid=$!

modprobe natsemi &

natsemipid=$!

(wait $natsemipid; sshd & nfsd &) &

networkpid=$!
.
.
.

The above will permit 'modprobe natsemi' to begin before 'modprobe 
mousedev' completes.  Now this is probably a poor example as modprobe 
will be pretty fast, but if you had this applied to say, 25 module 
installations, you could likely see a difference.


-- 
Until later, Geoffrey	esoteric at 3times25.net

Building secure systems inspite of Microsoft