Unnecessary services? A guide to Gentoo services?

[jcbray]

Hey all,
I've just installed Gentoo for the....6th successful time now, set myself up nicely, nothing seems to be failing yet (use-related errors before...I'm a tinkerer). Anyways, as may be obvious to some, i'm a Windows user, and a big part of performance gain there was stopping all the unnecessary services from starting. Gentoo's still very foreign to me...so there are two questions here. Firstly, how do I turn services on and off (not ending process, but stopping them starting at all). I had a look and rc-update seems to be the thing....so is it simply that? Secondly, is there a list of services and what they do? for example, I don't know if I need agetty, as I have no idea what it does - aio?I have two gdm processes, both from the same location, but different ID's - same service loading twice unnecessarily or not? I'm not expecting an answer to the these questions here, just a link to a guide for services if there is one floating around...

If it's important I'm running the 2.6 hardened kernel

I've also some issues with bootspeed considering I have installed Gentoo on a laptop - iptables in particularly takes a long time to load - as well as hotplug and coldplug - I don't plug in any devices, (excepting power plug if that count) so is there a way to have these statically defined, rather then constant checking?

Any input on any of these issues would be greatly appreciated Right now my goal is to have Gentoo last as long as Windows does on the Laptop battery..I need to gain about 13minutes

[gami]

Yes, rc-update is used to control which services start automatically.

Most services won't use much (if any) cpu after starting, so you won't see much of a difference there. The ones which use specific hardware, such as a wireless card would have an effect, though.

Have you compiled any cpu governors into your kernel, like the "ondemand" govenor? If enabled (via programs from the sys-power/cpufrequtils package) the "ondemand" govenor can throttle your cpu down when it's not in use. This should reduce your power requirements. You can also use the app-laptop/laptop-mode-tools, which e.g. spin down the hard disk.

[jcbray]

Thanks for the reply

the cpu governers are installed and working, i'll have a look at those apps, thanks for the tip.