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

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos to you sir, for reducing the time it takes to type congratulations by instead using grats!

Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[Bryansix]

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

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

[sofar]

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.

Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[sofar]

actually we do bring up the network daemon (either connmand or network manager) as soon as we can, but we don't stop the entire startup process.

on my test system here it runs dhclient about when X starts up and the network card receives a reply with a few seconds from that, long before I can start firefox :)

Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[CODiNE]

Yeah, Safe Mode.

Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements

[sofar]

we don't even need to recompile the kernel, we can just link the modules in as needed. Something most older UNIX systems actually did.

On an old Pentium III laptop...

[mikael]

My stepfather still has an old Pentium III laptop with Windows 95 running on it. Booting the laptop to read an E-mail takes around 20 minutes. His advice to anyone who wants to use it, "switch on the PC, do something else like have a bath, do the lawn, read the newspaper, or have a coffee, and the PC will be ready to use before you know it".

Re:Does it matter?

[not already in use]

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.