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: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: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.