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Reducing Boot Time On a General Linux Distro
Linzer writes "In this blog entry, Fred Crozat (head of Mandriva's engineering team in France) explains in great detail how his team has been detecting and getting rid of bottlenecks in the boot process, from the early stages to loading the desktop environment, thus decreasing overall boot time. An informative tour of the nuts and bolts of the boot process and how they can be tinkered with: initrd, initscripts, udev, modprobe calls. The basic tool they use for performance analysis is bootchart, which produces a map of process information and resource utilization during boot. The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type her password."
I see what they're getting at but not how to achieve similar gains. Anybody out there feel like putting together a slightly more practical guide?
The use of "they" as a singular pronoun is by no means universally accepted.
Oh, come off with the PC policing! Do you actually expect us to pretend that there is an equal distribution of males to females in the geek world of obscure Linux distros? No one's saying that there aren't ANY women into Linux, just that using the feminine pronoun is a little disconcerting in a specific area that is represented by a male to female ratio of at least 9:1.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
On my systems, it's the BIOS that takes a very large chunk of the overall boot time. As far as it goes, I think the Core2 machine takes about the same amount of time to start loading the OS as the old 486 used to.
Having an x86_64 architecture is nice, but why oh why are we still lumbered with that legacy piece of you-know-what? I think I want a Mac Mini now, just because of that...!
-- Steve
I used to have that problem. Drove me bananas. The problem wasn't fixed until I got a new computer. I did find a slightly better solution than rebooting, though. I used to keep a CLI window up. If the mouse failed, I'd unload the USBHID kernel modules, then reload them. I don't remember which modules in specific, but it did provide relief without rebooting.
Unfortunately, this was a fairly common issue with the Linux kernel. There was little interest in fixing it at the time, so you may just need new hardware. (It's possible that the issue was ignored because it was caused by poor USB implementations. Which would hopefully mean that newer hardware is unaffected.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Gentoo's init system is like this (and has been for quite a while). It doesn't do stuff in parallel by default, but I think there is an option to enable that.
I think I remember hearing something about Ubuntu and/or Debian also trying to create something like that, as well.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
I would invoke the "Humpty Dumpty Principle" (from Carrol's "Through the Looking Glass"). Quoting: 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'
"Their" is in common usage to indicate his/her. It has the advantage of being less awkward to say and looks less strange on the page. It also has the benefit of annoying grammarians, who seem to believe that they subscribe to the One True Way.
Their has been in common usage for a possessive of indeterminate gender since before grammarians decided to declare rules for the English language based on their (sexist) biases and preferences. Wikipedia provides a mind-numbingly detailed description of this history and grammatical rules surrounding it, but this usage dates to the 1300's.
Here are some fun quotes that Wikipedia gathered showing usage of they and their as singular by famous authors:
-- Arise; one knocks. / ... / Hark, how they knock! - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
-- 'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear the speech. - Shakespeare, Hamlet
-- I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. - Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
-- That's always your way, Maimâ"always sailing in to help somebody before they're hurt. - Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
So this is not some modern invention of feminists or the ignorant, but simply usage that is not favored by self-appointed grammar police. (At least in France the grammar police are official and given the duty of writing the rules on behalf of that nation. It seems that there, too, people go on speaking without regard to the official rules.)
-Jon
Shorter boot time. With s2disk you don't have to wait for the bios to POST, for the kernel to probe your devices, etc. Also, how well does this kde feature deal with terminal windows? If I'm editing something in vi in a terminal, is KDE smart enough to reopen the terminal window and start vi with the cursor right where I left it with my history and everything intact? I'd be amazed if it were.
s2disk works very very well, at least on my laptop. It's the right tool for this purpose.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Actually, a Cobalt Qube with no fan because it runs cool enough to not need it. It does a fine job of powering IPCop on its old 250mhz MIPS processor, providing a firewall, SQUID, and NAT for the house, and only using a handful of watts while doing it.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
While servers still seem to take hours to get past their BIOSes, modern laptops often have options for skipping the POST and generally taking shortcuts enumerating devices. The EeePC has a "BootBooster" option where it caches BIOSes results to solid state disk so the BIOS finishes in less than a second (rather than 4 or 5). It is so fast it can be a pain when you actually DO want to change a BIOS option!
OK, er, you fail. Epically.
These are completely different types of work. What Arjan is doing is tailoring boot to a specific set of software running on a specific set of hardware, using an entirely legacy-free init system.
This is nothing at all like what Fred is doing, which is optimizing a legacy boot system for completely generic hardware and software - it has to run on any system, with any set of software available from the Mandriva repositories installed.
The two types of work are utterly and entirely different.
For the record, another of our engineers - Claudio Matsuoka - has been working on the *other* type of boot system for several months now. It began as a re-implementation of the 'fastinit' system found in the Xandros distribution on the Eee. This system is called 'finit', and you can find it at http://helllabs.org/finit/ . It is used in Mandriva Mini, our custom edition for netbook OEMs. It pre-dates Arjan's work substantially, or at least the public announcement of it.