[arch-dev-public] [PATCH] Start sequences of daemons in background

[James Rayner]

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.
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