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."

Comments

Boot time not an issue.

[AmIAnAi]

I thought one of the arguments for linux was that you didn't need to reboot - like you do with Windows. So the boot time should not matter :-)

Re:Boot time not an issue.

[arth1]

Indeed. The boot time of a system you boot once a year is rather irrelevant.
Laptop, you say? Hibernate, don't boot!

What's more interesting is to reduce the login time and start-up time for applications. prelink is your best friend here. Make sure that all your apps are compiled for position independent code (PIC), and prelink them. Lots of time saved, at the expense of larger binaries.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Boot time not an issue.

[Micah]

In my Kubuntu Feisty install, Hibernate takes about as long as shutting down and starting it back up about as long as a normal start.

Of course, all the apps are still there so that helps. But it's not nearly as efficient as, say, a Mac where you can close the lid any time, open it back up again and have it right there in 2 seconds.

Re:Boot time not an issue.

[Bert64]

But as you said, for the first few minutes after boot, windows is thrashing the disk and running slower... Sometimes it even does ridiculous things, like closing the start menu while your trying to select something from it, or ignoring some mouse clicks.
You could make linux start in the same way, modify the init scripts to start XDM first, and everything else later, in which case you'd have the same appearance of fast booting.

Customize the Bootscript, Trim the Fat

[Old Duck]

Most bootscripts are very generic in that they will try to load all sorts of RAID drivers, various services that are not needed, special fonts, etc.. I've gone in on my computers and wrote a very simple, quick, and to-the-point bootscript (easy to do with a little BASH knowledge), and my system boots up remarkedly fast. Granted, my bootscript isn't very portable, but one of the benefits of Linux is the ability to customize it.

Another trick is to prelink files and let KDE (if that is what you use) know about it. Even the startkde script can be long and drawn out, so trimming the fat and only including what's needed on your system can make a big difference. I've shaved over 13 seconds off a boot sequence by writing a minimum bootscript for my hardware, and that was using a relatively fast distro to start with.

-Mike