I'm back from Sweden, and while I was away, ELCE was held. The nice people from Free Electrons luckily put up all the conference videos in webm format, so whoever missed it can catch up. One of the first videos I watched was Integrating systemd: Booting Userspace in Less Than 1 Second, held by Koen Kooi, who I remembered from the time I used Openembedded on Openmoko devices.

Some know that I like to show off my neat little Thinkpad x200s for its boot time; so far under 5 seconds (from bootloader to X) using Gentoo, OpenRC, and Enlightenment. I wanted to try systemd for a while but never really was in the mood to do the actual work. The video inspired me to actually give it a try now.

Installing systemd is incredibly straight-forward, just read the gentoo-wiki articles and make sure you have your "init scripts" (or .service files in systemd jargon) ready. Enough talk, just let me finish with this: I was utterly impressed how well systemd works and I'm looking forward to it replacing all other init systems currently out there (including OpenRC which I actually liked). But look for yourself:

Some stats:

Linux version 3.1  
systemd version 37  
udev 175

Linux -> systemd: ~1s  
systemd -> e17: ~1s  
e17 -> ready: ~1.5s

If you have questions or need config files, just ping me via mail/jabber/irc.