serel - fast boot software

Download and installation

serel home

Download and installation

The current release of serel in binary format:


The source code is available as:

serel is open source software, available under the GNU General public licence, Version 2.  See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt for the full license text.

The software can also be downloaded from the sourceforge mirror.

2002-08-06 - Note to users of Debian GNU/Linux - the .deb is coming soon!

Installation for Redhat users

1. Install the rpm

  rpm --install -vh serel-*.rpm

2. Patch your /etc/rc.d/rc file

  # Log in as root.
  cd /etc/rc.d
  cp rc rc.ok # make a copy
  patch -p0 rc < /usr/share/serel/redhat-rc-7.x.patch 

Voila - go ahead and reboot, or read the notes below.

Notes for users

Timing the boot
Users armed with a stopwatch should be aware that the computer boots faster the second time it boots with serel.  serel maintains a database that optimises run-time dependency and integrity checking.  The database only gets rebuilt when something changes.

Currently, the redhat patch only uses serel to execute the runlevel services in parallel.  This means that you start the stopwatch when you see "Entering non-interactive startup", and stop the stopwatch when you see a login prompt.

To switch between serel and non-serel boot, edit /etc/sysconfig/serel.

With the current patch for redhat, you'll see the bootstrap messages jumbled.  So instead of

Bringing up interface eth0:  [ OK ]
Starting random:             [ OK ]
Starting sshd:               [ OK ]

you'll see something like:

Bringing up interface eth0: Starting random: [ OK ]
Starting sshd: [ OK ] [ OK ]

This (cosmetic) issue will disappear in a future release.

Uninstall
To uninstall serel, you can simply uninstall the rpm:

rpm --erase -v serel

You don't need to back out your changes to /etc/rc.d/rc, it'll just revert to normal, sequential boot.

Developers

1. Obtain the source code

See http://www.fastboot.org/download.html.

2. Obtain the packages that serel requires

Building serel requires two libraries that may not be a part of your 'C' development environment:

Once the required packages are installed, serel is built with the familar:
gunzip serel-*.gz
tar xvf serel-*.tar
cd serel-*
./configure
make
make check   # optional
make install # optional



Copyright (c) 2002 by Leni Mayo