How Kernel Hackers Boosted the Speed of Desktop Linux

chromatic writes "Kernel hackers Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok showed off Linux booting in five seconds at last month's Linux Plumbers Conference. Arjan and other hackers have already improved the Linux user experience by reducing power consumption and latency. O'Reilly News interviewed him about his work on improving the Linux experience with PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot."

Comments

Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[pwnies]

Not only is this an impressive accomplishment, but if this can be applied generically to most distributions then it should present an excellent opportunity for advertisement. Showing how you can boot, check your email, read the latest news, and be done with all you need to have done while a fellow Vista machine is still booting says a lot. Even if we can get most distributions down to 15sec average, it's a huge leap. Grats to these guys.

Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[SilentChris]

The only issue is that they had to cut some corners to make this work. Axing sendmail? Ok, I understand that (I think was arguing that 10 years ago -- still don't wonder why that's on by default in the desktop distributions). But "The 'done booting' time did not include bringing up the network"? Um, ok... no. With the proliferation of devices solely used to read information from networks (Netbooks, those "quick-loading" Linux apps some laptop manufacturers are including so people can check their email, etc.) accessing the network is one of the main purposes for turning on the machine in the first place. It would royally piss people off to have a quick loading screen, log in and then see "Hold up, still starting up the network". (Just as frustrating as starting a Windows or Mac, getting to the desktop and still waiting while services and programs are loaded).

Come to think of it, what people really need to do is take a good look at modern OSes and determine EXACTLY what still needs to be there and what's cruft. Some of the daemons/services we're launching made sense 15-20 years ago. Does the fax daemon really need to start on my Mac? Does the Group Policy Client need to be started on my Vista box when I'm not on a domain? There's lots of stuff that at one point probably made sense to someone but now is just extraneous.

Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[nschubach]

... but an OEM can. (If they were so inclined.)

Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[schwaang]

Sendmail's main purpose in the typical Linux desktop configuration (say, Fedora) is delivering logwatch output to root. [Logwatch attempts to distill the important stuff from system log files.]

But sendmail can be started lazily (in the background) so as not to slow the boot. Or sendmail can be replaced with a lighter weight smtp daemon. Truly though, logwatch-by-email should die for non-enterprise desktops. It's so 1980s it just hurts.

IMHO logwatch should be replaced by some kind of graphical notification widget which requires authentication to actually view the details, since they can be sensitive. As it is, I haven't read my logwatch emails in months, but if SMART is complaining about an immanent disk failure I'd *really* like to know.

Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[Theolojin]

Actually Vista with 4 Gigs of RAM boots pretty quickly. It's once it's up that it is slow.

Microsoft seems to have performed a bit of trickery to make you perceive that Vista boots quickly. The desktop on my wife's Vista laptop appears fairly quickly but it is simply unusable for a couple more minutes. This is different from XP which is fairly usable as soon as (well, shortly after) the desktop appears. It's rather like the desktop is the bootsplash on Vista.

Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[es330td]

What really needs to happen is for there to be an informative display of what is happening when the system is loading, something that is one of my favorite things about linux. Most people wouldn't gripe about how long it takes for their system to load if they knew what it was that was loading. Sadly, I have stopped being amazed by the people who complain that "Windows loads slow" and then go in and find that they are incapable of saying "No" to any application that wants to install itself on their system. If you want the iTunes Helper and 6 different IE toolbars to load then you accept that requires time. If your fancy all-in-one fax/printer/scanner/roaster has some special monitor that has to load, suck it up and accept a slow load but at least allow the user of any OS to see what exactly it is that is getting put in memory when their system starts up.

Does it matter?

[suso]

I see a lot of comments on the LWN article of people talking about starting services after the user sees the desktop as cheating. However, I ask, does this really all matter. I'm not sure how everyone else uses their computer but I only need to boot my Linux machine about once every 30-60 days. I don't need to dual boot like I did back in say 2002 and comparitively, the amount of time it takes for Linux and X to start up are practically irrelivent. I can imagine laptop users may feel much differently about this, but I thought that was the point of being able to suspend/hibernate.

One thing that worries me is that a focus on ensuring a quick boot at the expense of a potentially less stable system is not a good thing. Fortunately however quick booting is not something that Linux requires, its something that distributions can decide to do or not, which is one of the strengths of the open source/Linux way.

Re:Does it matter?

[arth1]

Being able to boot in NN seconds isn't so impressive when you look at the incompatibilities it creates.

On my networks, the servers connect to the DHCP server and get not only an IP back, but also the name of NIS servers, who in turn returns (among other things) autofs maps which are used to mount the home directories as well as providing login authentication. The xdm login window returns a list of currently available X servers.
In other words, there are reasons why things run in the order they run, and any deviation will cause things to stop working.

Improving things are fine, but not when it's at the expense of current and well-known functionality.

Re:Does it matter?

[chromatic]

On my networks...

... you can't take advantage of all of these improvements. Why penalize everyone who doesn't use NIS and autofs?

Re:Does it matter?

[tepples]

On my networks, the servers connect to the DHCP server and get not only an IP back, but also the name of NIS servers, who in turn returns (among other things) autofs maps which are used to mount the home directories as well as providing login authentication.

What you describe is similar to what Windows calls "domain authentication". Not every computer logs on to a domain, especially in the home or home office environment where a fast boot is paramount.

The xdm login window returns a list of currently available X servers.

Then have it refresh the list whenever a network interface comes up.

Re:Does it matter?

[sofar]

so you are saying that you would rather stare at a hung boot in text mode instead of having the possibility of working in offline mode in X?

that does not make sense at all :)

for network-client setups like you describe, we should still start X immediately and if the network fails or is slow, at least provide some interaction with the system (work offline, nudge network with login attempt etc).

Re:Does it matter?

[gollito]

How ironic, with all the Vista bashing that tends to go on in threads like these. Vista boots relatively quickly, and hasn't been powered down for me for weeks since suspend/wake works perfectly. But at least someone, somewhere can boot linux in 5 seconds.

Agreed. The only time I reboot my laptop is after updates/new software install. IMO the power management in Vista is the best I've seen.

Booting is overrated

[Geheimagent]

I suspend or hibernate most of the time. I reboot my laptop only when the kernel gets a security fix. I don't care if that takes 40 seconds.