From here we bring in the Linux kernel, drivers, and user-land daemons. Our kernel is mostly stock except for a handful of patches that we pull in to improve boot performance. On the user-land side of things we have streamlined the init process so that we're only running services that are critical. All of the user-land services are managed by Upstart. By using Upstart we are able to start services in parallel, re-spawn jobs that crash, and defer services to make boot faster.