> > If I'm not terribly mistaken, it should not be very difficult to use
> > the 1.5 boot script setup to (re)generate a single-file/single-pass
> > boot script.  I would recommend going down this path instead of
> > downgrading to the 1.4.x boot scripts.
>
> OK.  Is there anything else in the new booting scripts or elsewhere
> that one might fiddle with to help speed up the really slow machines?
> I stripped some code out of my netstart script, for example, and put in
> a force the one and only qe0 interface to ifconfig, and that sped up
> that section of booting by 15 seconds or so.  How far could one strip
> the boot scripts down on a 1.0 VUP and under box to speed it along.

That all depends...

What I think I would try first would be to try to stay away from
manual mucking around with the internals of the new startup
system, and instead use the theory that what's the killer in the
startup process is the number of processes that are required to
churn through the scripts, i.e. that the startup overhead for new
processes is (relatively) large, and that something can be gained
from parsing several of the files only once.

So... what you could gain from creating a single-file startup
script would in addition to reduce the number of processes be
that /etc/rc.conf, /etc/defaults/rc.conf and /etc/rc.subr only
would need to be parsed once, not once per script in /etc/rc.d.
Thus, I would probably simply cat the rc.d scripts together in
the order calculated by rcorder, and replacing /etc/rc with the
resulting generated script.

An additional option could be to omit the scripts whose services
you know you have not activated in rc.conf.

However, if you still need to go further, I suspect you'll lose
some of the generality and regenerability of the startup scripts
through manual tweaking such as suggested above.

(All this said without further inspecting the internals of the
1.5 startup scripts, so some of the details may be wrong...)

Regards,

- H=E5vard