Booting Linux Faster

krony writes "IBM's DeveloperWorks explains how to decrease boot times for your Linux box. The concept is to load system services in parallel when possible. Most surprising to me is the use of 'make' to handle dependencies between services." The example system shown is able to cut its boot time in half, but the article stresses the effectiveness can vary widly from machine to machine.

Comments

Predicted response

[Anonymous Coward]

"Who cares how long it takes to boot Linux? My uptime is 400 days!!!"

Yup.. just keep talking about that and wonder why Linux never becomes mainstream.

Re:Predicted response

[Crispy Critters]

"This is the current state of the Linux community."

No it isn't. I am on a local LUG mailing list, and people are politely helping newbies all the time, going out of their way to explain things that weren't even asked, just in case it might help.

"Not only the case on Slashdot, but go to any IRC help channel and you'll find the same the majority of the time."

IRC and /. were not exactly designed for thoughtful interaction.

Re:Predicted response

[Trepalium]

In order for him to get a straight answer he had to pre-emptively insult himself "Guys, I know I'm entirely retarded, but does anyone know how to get mplayer to play X?"

Uhm, so you think that just because someone insulted himself during the post means that everyone who might provide you with free technical support on Linux is a prick? Hate to break this to you, but that's hardly Linux's fault. Regardless of what you look for support on, you'll find idiots who want to give you snide comments like RTFM, or go do it yourself. My experience is that most people will try to help you provided you show that you made some effort to solve the problem yourself (such as state what you tried that didn't work).

Lets assume that you call a vendor for support. You'd likely to have paid for the support, so the vendor will likely allow you to be somewhat abusive of their support personelle because the money you pay them is worth the inconvenience. Now, most of the support you get on newsgroups is by people not getting any income for answering your questions, so their tolerance to put up with crap is significantly decreased. If you even ask a question in such a way that makes you look like you might be one of the assholes they deal with in the support business, you will be dropped as quickly as possible. When you want something for nothing, being polite and courteous versus appearing to bark out demands is the difference between getting an answer, and getting "RTFM". BTW, this applies equally to proprietary software lists (unmanned by paid employees) as to free software lists. Lists and discussion groups with paid employees answering questions (such as microsoft.public.*) can be friendlier, but you get boilerplate responses more often, and the same answer three times over before someone finally gets that their solution doesn't work for your problem.

Re:Predicted response

[kelnos]

seriously... after reading through a bunch of these posts, i see soooo many "why do i care how long it takes to boot up? i just boot it and leave it for a year." a few are joking, but most are just ignorant idiots. sure, there are some of us (myself included) that don't turn off their machine (i probably would to save on the utilities bill, but i host websites for a few student orgs at my school, among other things). anyway, there are _plenty_ of people that could make a faster boot useful. laptop users, for one. people that only use their computers for a few short tasks a day, and turn it off. people that don't need to run it overnight for whatever reason, and actually like the idea of saving a little energy.

get a little perspective, people. ignorance is so first millennium...

Re:Another way to speed up booting Linux

[pudding7]

Anyone ever wonder how we got ourselves into a situation where we spend so much time saving ourselves time?

Make?

[JohnGrahamCumming]

Most surprising to me is the use of 'make' to handle dependencies between services."

Really? That's an odd statement. How surprising that they choose to use an open-source software application that is designed to compactly represent dependencies for representing dependencies.

Perhaps they should have drawn Visio diagrams instead!?

John.

Re:Make?

[Feztaa]

I think it's clever, because (possibly) nobody ever thought of doing it before. Make is a tool that makes it easy to compile programs, not for booting your system.

I've heard that a program isn't truly successful until it's been used in a way unimagined by the original author. I guess make is now truly successful :)

Re:Hmm

[4of12]

someone has a use for this

You bet.

How long are you willing to wait for your stereo receiver to boot up, your TV, or your TiVo?

This is a really important issue for embedded devices like consumer electronics built on Linux.

Re:boot?

[kcurtis]

> I rarely have to boot ever after the first boot and patch!

Probably true. But one goal of linux is to become the predominant desktop/laptop OS.

I work for a public school system. I'd rather not have all these computers eating up power all night when they're not being used.

In most work environments, pc's get turned off over night, and sometimes even at lunch.

This is one more way someone is helping to make Linux a better candidate for your casual end user.

This is actually important

[augustz]

I see there are already a ton of linux fanboys and girls posting about the incredible uptime of their linux boxes, and claiming that a) boot time doesn't matter because linux doesn't go down or b) linux boots very fast.

They are wrong. Boot time matters.

It matters for perception. Boot time is one of the periods where a user spends the most time looking at a screen not being able to do anything (even if that happens rarely). A faster boot time leads to a sense that the whole system is faster, because it is a first impression, and a significant impression. If linux bliped on from a cold start in 5 seconds, I'd be studies would show it appeared faster.

Boot time matters because not everyone (in fact, very few people) leave their systems on all the time. Slashdot fan boys living at home may not agree, but they are wrong.

Think about business systems. At my place of work, everyone turns their computer off at the end of the day, and on at the beginning of the next. My mother doesn't leave her computer running 24/7, she turns it OFF when she is done using it. My roomates do the same thing. Even I do it sometimes.

Boot time matters because power management is still evolving under linux. As power management requires the cooperation of a number of pieces of a system, power management is still a work in progress. Once power management with every peripheral is flawless, then we can start to dial back boot time worries (only a little).

Boot time matters server side too. I know folks are going to complain that I focus on the user too much. But boot time matters server side as well. We have UPS units on our servers. They have however a limited lifetime. So when the power drops for a few minutes (which it does here somewhat often) automatic shutdown process starts.

When the power comes back on, people power up their computers. These being Windows XP machines they actually start pretty quickly (or never went off if on a UPS). If folks were in the middle of something, they expect that with the power their logon and other services will be back in action. Then all the individual computers start timing out / locking up, generating help calls.

On the server side, if there was an emergency security patch, or we were coming up from a power outage, the faster the boot time the better, if I can beat out even 20% of the client connect attempts.

Boot time matters, a big bravo to the folks working to improve this.