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Ever since Ubuntu Edgy much of the low hanging fruit in speeding up the Ubuntu boot has already been taken. Looking at the bootcharts for my system since then shows remarkably little time when the CPU is idle once the base kernel has finished loading. This means that running anything more in parallel simply won't net me anything (in fact scheduler overhead and disk thrashing may in theory make things slower).

For example, there is an improvement in the time it takes for the clock to appear from "Ubuntu Dapper Flight 3 Default kernel" to "Ubuntu Feisty Herd 5 generic kernel". The Ubuntu folks worked hard to try an eliminate sleeps from their initscripts and when a sleep was unavoidable they would run other parts of the startup process in parallel. They also made changes to Xorg to prevent it (re)reading so much stuff on launch. There was also the introduction of the readahead script which tries to arrange for as much of the boot time reading to be done in one big chunk. Throughput is higher when the disk is only reading and can utilise it's readahead. An attempt is also made to try and request files in the order in which they are laid out on disk (to minimise disk seeks which hurt performance). In Feisty a move was made to using dash instead of bash for scripts because it was smaller and executes scripts faster.

The only things that seem to win me any gain over the default Ubuntu Feisty install are turning off initscripts for services I absolutely won't use (e.g. ipv4 autoconfig via avahi) and reducing the number of restricted binary driver modules being probed (I have long noticed that the only benefit that recompiling the kernel gives to boot speed is that you can simply leave out features not on your computer making the initial kernel startup where it probes for things you might not have (like which software RAID is faster) a shade faster). It is also worth noting that Ubuntu starts X quite early and continues loading services afterwards which means the gain from disabling one of these "after X" services (like CUPS) isn't so noticeable (but might mean your desktop actually starts responding to clicks a bit sooner).

Profiling the boot to try and improve the readahead takes a long time to run - the profile run seems to take three times as long as a regular boot. It could be argued that you will never gain back the extra time you waited on the profile run...

I suspect reducing the boot further will start to need more complicated procedures, perhaps reordering modprobe.conf and reducing the amount of needless reading of files. Eventually you end up having to do the same tricks as Windows/OSX - e.g. working out where the fastest part of the disk is and copying every file needed to boot there, bringing up the network cardafter the desktop has started, periodically defraging bits of the disk, prelinking...

Here are some updates regarding X.org on Debian. Apparently it'll not be available for Sarge either. You can read about it in Daniel Stone's blog and Erich Schubert's here and here.

I guess now that they've fixed a lot of bugs with radeon drivers in the new X.org release, things seem to be looking good in that direction.

Yes you are. Fans are noisy, a lot of people turn their machines off at night. Leaving your computer on when you're out, away for the weekend, at work, etc may be justificable if it hosts internet/network services but is a shameful waste of energy if you don't - do you always leave your lights on because the bulb is less likely to blow?

Also, as is clearly stated - this is desktop use. That includes laptops, which obviously have to be powered down an awful lot. It is all very well to point out the power of UNIX systems and their uptimes, but that does not make it illegitimate to improve the speed with which they boot.

I say good luck to Red Hat and Ubuntu.

This sounds very similar to this.

Apple : iTunes 4.5 Authentication Cracked
Posted by michael in The Mysterious Future!
from the powered-by-mountain-dew dept.
fooishbar writes "Yesterday, Apple released iTunes 4.5, which deliberately broke the 4.2 authentication scheme, which had been successfully reverse-engineered. However, crazney has been at it again, and within 24 hours of downloading iTunes 4.5, has broken the new scheme, and added more features to this library along the way. If you want to incorporate iTMS support in your program, give libopendaap a go!" Reader ScottGant submits this story about the Pepsi/iTunes promotion: "News.com has this story about Pepsi's iTunes promotion give-away. The promotion,
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Actually, only one of the Freedesktop.org trees has alpha-blending and shadows right now.

There are two servers: Xizzle and KDrive. KDrive is Keith's experimental X server, which has all the nifty eye candy and is in general a testing ground for extentions. Xizzle is a attempt to us the GNU autotools as the buildchain for the X server. (Both use automake/autoconf, but the Xizzle branch is more stock from 4.3-r2 right now then KDrive, for obvious reasons and also because KDrive is a bit older. I think. o_O)

Daniel Stone posted a great explination of all the trees going on to his blog here

One of the members of the team, daniel stone is currently working on packaging all the FreeDesktop stuff. See his blog entry for an explanation.

One of the members of the team, daniel stone is currently working on packaging all the FreeDesktop stuff. See his blog entry for an explanation.

Eventually people will get the message and either build/buy propretary solutions or adhere to the licenses of the Free Software they choose. Someone should have known that putting a statically compiled in wireless driver into a commercial product means one of two things, yank as a mistake on sight and say sorry, or release the source. If you build a product on Free Software, you should understand what you are doing and if you are not planning on releasing everything you do you had better be real careful you don't contaminate what you want to "keep"! I see it as a good thing, as it reinforces the "community" element of Free Software and reassurres people who might put serious work into Free Software that it won't be hijacked by others who won't follow the rules (well don't know what would happen with GPL violations/violators in China, for example, at present).

BTW I only want Linux to gain widespread acceptance if it is still Free, the video card market is where this battle is really being fought at present though with Daniel Stone's announcment that XFree86 has been forked (I submitted a first story to slashdot about this 9 days ago and it's still pending), not once but twice (by X.org and freedesktop.org) perhaps a shake-up is coming.