startpar

startpar [-p par] [-i iorate] [-t timeout] [-T global_timeout] [-a arg] prg1 prg2 ...
startpar [-p par] [-i iorate] [-t timeout] [-T global_timeout] -M [ boot|start|stop]

startpar is used to run multiple run-level scripts in parallel. The degree of parallelism on one CPU can be set with the -p option, the default is full parallelism. An argument to all of the scripts can be provided with the -a option. Processes blocked by pending I/O will cause new process creation to be weighted by the iorate factor 800. To change this factor the option -i can be used to specify another value. The amount will be subtracted from the total number of processes which could be started, where nblocked is the number of processes currently blocked by pending I/O.

The output of each script is buffered and written when the script exits, so output lines of different scripts won’t mix. You can modify this behaviour by setting a timeout.

The timeout set with the -t option is used as buffer timeout. If the output buffer of a script is not empty and the last output was timeout seconds ago, startpar will flush the buffer.

The -T option timeout works more globally. If no output is printed for more than global_timeout seconds, startpar will flush the buffer of the script with the oldest output. Afterwards it will only print output of this script until it is finished.

The -M option switches startpar into a make(1) like behaviour. This option takes three different arguments: boot, start, and stop for reading .depend.boot or .depend.start or .depend.stop respectively in the directory /etc/init.d/. By scanning the boot and runlevel directories in /etc/init.d/ it then executes the appropriate scripts in parallel.

/etc/init.d/.depend.boot
/etc/init.d/.depend.start
/etc/init.d/.depend.stop

2003,2004 SuSE Linux AG, Nuernberg, Germany.
2007 SuSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany.

init(8) insserv(8).

Michael Schroeder <mls@suse.de>
Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Werner Fink <werner@suse.de>