Delay some services until system has finished booting

[Michael Terry]

Binary package hint: upstart

From boot time reduction work, it has been noticed that some system services that aren't actually needed to bring up the UI could probably be delayed until the system is idle.

I don't know if this means an event like "dm-finished" or an event like "boot-idle" or something.

Services that may be good candidates for delay: avahi, tty*, rsyslog, plymouth-log, cron, and anacron?

[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for raising this and we shall investigate the possibility of deferring service startup if possible.

The infrastructure to achieve this is already available in Lucid onwards in the form of two sneakily "almost undocumented" events (they are mentioned in changelog entries only for Lucid+Maverick I believe):

- login-session-start (emitted when gdm starts. Note: *NOT* emitted by kdm/lightdm yet...)
- desktop-session-start (emitted when first user logs in)

With Natty, we should be shipping with a new man page I've written listing "well-known" events (including those above):

  http://people.canonical.com/~jhunt/upstart/man/upstart-events.pdf

Caveat: this page is beta and displays poorly via PDF. If you want to view it properly:

  wget http://people.canonical.com/~jhunt/upstart/man/upstart-events.7
  tbl upstart-events.7 | nroff -man | less

[Clint Byrum (clint-fewbar)]

This seems very doable, there may be other events that need to be emitted. Marking as Confirmed, setting Importance to Wishlist. Other packages that can take advantage of the mentioned events or new events should add themselves to this bug report.