10 ms·

> it's funny that many people mention boot time as a metric For the majority of deployments of systemd, that's probably true. Note that this is a musl port, an

> it's funny that many people mention boot time as a metric For the majority of deployments of systemd, that's probably true. Note that this is a musl port, and that the existing musl port is from OpenEmbedded. It's embedded devices that are often using cut-down userspaces (e.g. using MUSL), and embedded devices often do care about startup time because they're not Always-On. E.g. the VTech baby monitor I've just bought is generally pretty good, but spends >10 seconds at a splash screen when you turn it on. No idea if it's Linux under the hood, but an optimised boot time would be great. In a previous work project, we need the Linux based software to be ready from low power state quickly (battery powered, only doing work occasionally). By getting the boot time down <1s, I could also avoid a load of sleep-state shenanigans - when we wanted to power save, we just turned off completely (there was already a supervisory micro to decide when to turn back on).

throwaway984393 2y ago
It's pretty trivial for an embedded device to trim down the series of startup tasks to only what's required, and then just write a C program that does those steps. I certainly wouldn't pick up such a gigantic, complex and potentially insecure package as systemd for an embedded project. I want less moving parts, not more
- telotortium 2y ago
  It depends on what you mean by embedded, I suppose. Having a service monitor to restart your jobs is pretty useful too, and it can be tricky enough to write a good one. Something like a baby monitor (to use an example mentioned elsewhere) might run almost as many services as a desktop Linux installation.
6SixTy 2y ago
Good chance that baby monitor uses something like FreeRTOS, not Linux for doing it's stuff. If you are unlucky, it's Android and they did the bare minimum to have a functional product. E: Also, Android uses the Linux kernel, but similarities with Linux based operating systems pretty much stop there.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  Android is a Linux based operating system so saying it stops there doesn’t make any sense. There is a wild variety of Linux OS out there in embedded encompassing a lot of various patchsets, libc and userland. You just have a bad understanding of what are Linux OS if all you think about is the usual distros.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > Android is a Linux based operating system Where are the posix utilities ? /s Where is man ? /s
    - Lockal 2y ago
      No sarcasm, Bionic libc is a subset of POSIX, Musl strictly follows POSIX 2008 and Glibc is superset of POSIX. 99% of Glibc->Musl porting is dealing with non-POSIX features (a.k.a. GNU extensions)[1]. So in the end we could find that Android apps are more POSIX compliant than software from generic glibc-based distros. [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Musl_porting_notes https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Musl_porting_notes
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]

throwaway984393 2y ago

It's pretty trivial for an embedded device to trim down the series of startup tasks to only what's required, and then just write a C program that does those steps. I certainly wouldn't pick up such a gigantic, complex and potentially insecure package as systemd for an embedded project. I want less moving parts, not more

telotortium 2y ago
It depends on what you mean by embedded, I suppose. Having a service monitor to restart your jobs is pretty useful too, and it can be tricky enough to write a good one. Something like a baby monitor (to use an example mentioned elsewhere) might run almost as many services as a desktop Linux installation.

6SixTy 2y ago

Good chance that baby monitor uses something like FreeRTOS, not Linux for doing it's stuff. If you are unlucky, it's Android and they did the bare minimum to have a functional product. E: Also, Android uses the Linux kernel, but similarities with Linux based operating systems pretty much stop there.

RandomThoughts3 2y ago
Android is a Linux based operating system so saying it stops there doesn’t make any sense. There is a wild variety of Linux OS out there in embedded encompassing a lot of various patchsets, libc and userland. You just have a bad understanding of what are Linux OS if all you think about is the usual distros.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > Android is a Linux based operating system Where are the posix utilities ? /s Where is man ? /s
  - Lockal 2y ago
    No sarcasm, Bionic libc is a subset of POSIX, Musl strictly follows POSIX 2008 and Glibc is superset of POSIX. 99% of Glibc->Musl porting is dealing with non-POSIX features (a.k.a. GNU extensions)[1]. So in the end we could find that Android apps are more POSIX compliant than software from generic glibc-based distros. [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Musl_porting_notes https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Musl_porting_notes
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]