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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."

1 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements by sofar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    says who?

    We talked with both the fedora and ubuntu developers at the LPC and even they agreed that a LOT more drivers should be compiled into the kernel instead of being modules (c'mon, ext3 as a module? really?).

    99% of what we did to make this work in 5 seconds applies straight for generic laptops and even most people's desktop sytems.

    The speedups _still_ are relevant with generic spinning media too. Maybe those are not as fast as SSD's, but the principle is still the same (IOW, for instance reading data in the order that you need it, is better than reading it in the order that it is scattered across the hard disk)

    speeding up the kernel to boot in 1 second is TOTALLY applicable to generic distros (not only that, it's relatively easy and we basically already did that).

    speeding up X startup to be 1.5s is TOTALLY applicable to generic distros.