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How Kernel Hackers Boosted the Speed of Desktop Linux

Posted by timothy on from the mild-claims dept.

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."

2 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Should lead to possibly great advertisements by pwnies · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements by SilentChris · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.