This patch allows you to background a whole sequence of daemons, rather than an individual daemon. As a result, you can get a very fast parallel boot. I suppose this could be considered an 'arch like' parallel boot setup. This isn't my idea, I'm sure someone has made a patch like this before however I couldnt find it and it never got merged. The major benefit is that boot doesnt get held up by slow starting dependencies, like hal and network. I can't background network because I have other services that depend on it such as nfs, ssh, iptables, ntpdate and cups. Similarly, I cant background hal, as gdm depends on it. For example... DAEMONS=(@net-auto,ntpdate,cups @acpi,hal,gdm syslog-ng cpufreq bluetooth crond) Comma delimited groups are started in background and run in sequence. Bootchart testing I saw a consistent improvement of at least 5s, from 31s to 26s. One boot somehow acheived 23s, and that was with full auto wireless enabled. I used a fixed modules list to avoid any inconsistency in udev time, so udev was always 1.9-2.1 seconds. I also used a wired connection for network as wireless connection time varied too much. There is a more noticable improvement with wireless, as it takes longer and can be backgrounded with the patch.