[driverloader] speeding up boot on FC2

[Jonathan Baron]

Driverloader has been working fine through several versions on my
Inspiron 9100 with Fedora Core 2.  See
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/delli.html

But the bootup often takes a long time at the step that loads
driverloader.  It is very odd.  If I shut down and then boot up
within a few hours, this step takes 10 sec.  If I wait longer,
like overnight, it takes about a minute.  I think it has to do
with some sort of swap file that gets used if it isn't too old.
I don't know.

I had an idea that seems to help, and I want share it with
others, both because it might help and because I might learn
something.  I modified /usr/sbin/rcdldr (which is the same as
/etc/init.d/driverloader, which gets used in /etc/rc.d/rc5.d) so
that it runs dldrconfig in the background, as follows:

case "$1" in
    start)
                echo "Starting Linuxant DriverLoader"
                /usr/sbin/dldrconfig --rcstart &

The only change here is the "&".  I suspect that this will cause
problems if you start the wireless at boot, but I don't.  It does
seem to help, a lot, although I tried it only once.

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron