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."

Comments

Re:Interesting but how useful, really?

[AKAImBatman]

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.)