[CentOS] Cemtos 7 : Systemd alternatives ?

[Lamar Owen]

On 07/08/2014 12:06 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Don't know about your servers, but ours take much, much longer for 
> their boot-time memory and hardware tests and initialization than 
> anything the old style sysvinit scripts do. 
Physical servers can be told to skip certain parts of their POST, 
especially the memory test.  Memory tests are redundant with ECC. (I 
know; I have an older SuperMicro server here that passes memory testing 
in POST but throws nearly continuous ECC errors in operation; it does 
operate, though).  If it fails during spinup, flag the failure while 
spinning up another server.

Virtual servers have no need of POST (they also don't save as much 
power; although dynamic load balancing can do some predictive heuristics 
and spin up host hypervisors as needed and do live migration of server 
processes dynamically).

To detect failures early, spin up every server in a rotating sequence 
with a testing instance, and skip POST entirely.

If you have to, spin up the server in a stateless mode and put it to 
sleep.  Then wake it up with dynamic state.

There are alot of possibilities here, if you're willing to think outside 
the 1970's timesharing minicomputer box that gave rise to the historical 
Unix philosophy.  And this has nothing to do with Windows; I have been a 
primarily-Linux user since 1997.

Long POSTs need to go away, with better fault tolerance after spinup 
being far more desirable, much like the promise of the old as dirt 
Tandem NonStop system. (I say the 'promise' rather than the 
'implementation' for a reason.....).