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How To Speed Up Linux Booting
An anonymous reader writes "A common complaint about Linux is the amount of time the operating system takes to start. Like Linux itself, there are plenty of options and lots of flexibility for boot-time optimization. From dependency-based solutions like initng to event-based solutions like upstart, there's an optimization solution that should fit your needs. Using the bootchart package, you can dig in further to understand where your system is spending its boot time to optimize even more."
I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason. The home user isn't going to be persuaded by Linux if he/she has to wait a long time to actually get a computer into a usable state*.
;)
To be fair, my Windows box boots pretty quick; I think the time between power on and desktop is somewhere in the region of 50 seconds. The method of loading the core services - desktop - additional services at least gives the impression of speed, even through the disk continues to thrash for another 45 seconds as applications load in the background.
* Jokes about Windows never being usable even after booting can be inserted here as required!
The world doesn't end just near your nose. You may have a laptop and you may be happy with "hibernating" it, but many of us need to power off PCs. An office PC I power on every day, my home's PC I power on and off when I get and leave home.
And it's your comment the one that is insulting. You insult lots of experienced Linux users who do care about their machines booting several times slower than an XP pc.
And why is that? Because Linux boots up with a slow and serialized process, in which the whole system (with hyperthreading, gigs of ram, dual core, etc.) sits idel waiting for a single stupid syslog daemon to start, or worse: waiting for a DHCP client to get an IP address!
That ARM board stores the entire operating system in flash. It uses busybox and pretty much nothing else, to get a shell up that fast. It doesn't have to wait for any hard drives or peripherals to initalize. LinuxBIOS can do similar things, but only on some machines. TFA is all about getting services to start quickly. Turning off everything is not an acceptable alternative.
Denying the problem doesn't make it go away, really. All the hibernation and sleep modes in the world don't change the fact that Linux boot times are much longer than, say, Windows XP's.
I'm sorry, but I run both Windows and Linux on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop, and booting Linux takes much, much longer. We're talking 2-3x longer, in fact.
Yeah, that's nice and all, assuming the power management actually works correctly.
Which, for many laptops, it doesn't. For instance, some time ago I finally managed to get hibernation mode to work (after a lot of fiddling), but it was still experimental at the time (ca. half a year ago) and would crash on resume sometimes. Not good when you have some important applications still running.
Now I'm running a different distribution (FC5) and it hangs after resuming from "normal" sleep mode (which is activated when I close the lid).
So yes, boot time is quite relevant for me, thank you very much, and saying this is FUD is
Or perhaps they are people who get tired of having to spend 2 weekends to get some stupid features, such as sleep mode and hibernation, to work correctly. Which then promptly breaks, of course, on the next kernel upgrade (which, in my case, was needed to get wireless to work).
This is also why I won't bother with trying to speed up the boot-time of my laptop, I'm waiting for some decent distro which does it for me!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Not really. Not even mozilla.org either. That would be about:blank.
I don't need to download a page every time I start my browser, render it and slow it down, then replace it immediately with another page I want to visit. That's another part of system optimisation, and it avoids unnecessary strain on slashdot/mozilla/other servers, too.
i think all we need is an near 100% reliable "suspend-to-some-super-fast-non-volatile-ram"
when we have that a reboot will be more like compiling the current state.
as long as you don't change any configration no reboot should be necessary at all.
just suspend and restore all the time.