STARTPAR(1) General Commands Manual STARTPAR(1)

# NAME¶

startpar - start runlevel scripts in parallel

# SYNOPSIS¶

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

# DESCRIPTION¶

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 $weight=(nblocked×iorate)/1000$ 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 /var/lib/insserv/. By scanning the boot and runlevel directories in /etc/rcX.d/ it then executes the appropriate scripts in parallel. When the -M flag is used with the -l flag startpar looks for the depend.boot, depend.start, and depend.stop scripts in its legacy location of /etc/init.d/ instead of /var/lib/insserv/.

Also note that if startpar cannot find its makefile-style scripts in /var/lib/insserv/, it will automatically check the legacy location as a fallback in case startpar is being run on a system that uses the old location.

The -e option allows the user to set the location of the system's etc configuration directory. The default is to use /etc. Using -e we can use alternative locations such as /usr/local/etc.

The -f option causes startpar to copy standard input (stdin) to standard output (stdout) until startpar reaches the end of input or the process is killed. When -f is used no programs are started and other parameters on the command line are ignored. This option is only kept for legacy purposes.

The -v option tells startpar to print its name and version number. When the version flag is used, all other command line parameters are ignored. The version number will be printed and startpar then immediately exits.

# FILES¶

/var/lib/insserv/depend.boot
/var/lib/insserv/depend.start
/var/lib/insserv/depend.stop

init(8) insserv(8).

2003,2004 SuSE Linux AG, Nuernberg, Germany.
2007 SuSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany.
2019 Jesse Smith

# AUTHOR¶

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

 Mar 2019