I'm currently running Debian Etch on my laptop, and the boot time was hideous when I first installed it. I already cut off a huge chunk of time by having 'ifup' run in the background, but it's still slower than I think it should be (given that my computer is decently fast). I installed bootchart to analyse the init process. The problem is that I don't know how to interpret the nice shiny graph that bootchart gives me. My current result is at www[dot]cs.grinnell.edu/~youngian/pics/bootchart_2.png. Obviously that big gap with no CPU or I/O is what I need to get rid of, but I'm not sure which process is causing it. My guess was that it was either pccardd or shpchpd_event, since those two seem to be running and not sleeping, but I poked around and didn't find any info on those particular processes running during boot. So any pointers on if I'm reading this thing right, and where I should go from here, would be appreciated.

Edit: Also, I'm not terribly interested in installing initng or runit at this point. I don't need to squeeze every unneeded second out of my boot, I just want it to be relatively speedy and not sit around waiting for something to timeout.

Edit2: Sorry about the lack of linkage. I guess that's what I get for lurking too much.

* bump in hopes of a response *