Ever wished that Linux would boot faster? Ever been frustrated that Linux, so good at multitasking, should be forced to start up all the system daemons one after another?
filerc-parallel.diff — a patch to Debian's file-rc package, which makes the system rc script start several daemons in parallel. It parallelises the startup of any daemons which are at the same "level" in the runlevel.conf file (so utilising the existing knowledge about startup order as far as possible — although by hand-tuning the levels you can get further speedups). I have been using this on my home computer for 6 months, and it seems good enough. No warranty, though!