Re: Improving the performance of system boot by eliding unused rc.d scripts and caching the result

[Jason Thorpe <thorpej%me.com@localhost>]

> On Aug 18, 2026, at 6:51 AM, Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> wrote:
> 
>> - the barrier scripts (e.g. LOGIN)
> 
>> The barrier scripts are needed only for ordering, [...]
> 
> If this really bothers someone, perhaps there could be a way for a
> script to declare itself a barrier script?  Perhaps something a la
> make's .PHONY, perhaps a naming convention, perhaps something else.

The number of barriers is tiny, and it doesn’t seem like the right engineering trade-off to add more decoration support for them in oder to be able to safely elide them from the cached result.

My goal here was to make a small, safe, non-invasive change, and I explcitly wanted to avoid any new functionality for rc.d scripts to adopt[*].

[*] Ok, to be fair, because a new directive keyword is added (“doeswork”), scripts technically can include a doeswork_cmd variable that overrides the default behavior.  But this is merely an intentional side-effect of how rc.subr works.

-- thorpej