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Ubuntu 9.04 Daily Build Boots In 21.4 Seconds
Pizzutz writes "Softpedia reports that Ubuntu 9.04 Boots in 21.4 Seconds using the current daily build and the newly supported EXT4 file system. From the article: 'There are only two days left until the third Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) will be available
(for testing), and... we couldn't resist the temptation to take the current daily build for a test drive, before our usual screenshot tour, and taste the "sweetness" of that evolutionary EXT4 Linux filesystem. Announced on Christmas Eve, the EXT4 filesystem is now declared stable and it is distributed with version 2.6.28 of the Linux kernel and later. However, the good news is that the EXT4 filesystem was implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 a couple of days ago and it will be available in the Ubuntu Installer, if you choose manual partitioning.' I guess it's finally time to reformat my /home partition..."
This is one of my pet peeves: why can't computers boot in a second or less?
Imagine a visionary like Steve Jobs (by the way, enjoy your leave of absence and please come back). He goes to his team and says "I don't care what it takes, build me a computer which boots in one second".
Ignore the past, the legacy of tens of years of layer after layer of OS software. Can it be done?
A 3 GHz dual-core processor can process 6 billion instructions in that first second. I know the disk is a problem. I'm not asking for all possible OS services to be up in a second... But I'm sure this could be improved greatly. It's all out there in the open. People want this.
--
FairSoftware.net -- work where geeks are their own boss
Well my TABLE LAMP boots in 50ms! Beat THAT!
(And to all you electrotech-people, yes, i live in Europe, 50Hz here. You may laugh now.)
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
For service pack 2.
Booted into Ubuntu 9.04 just to say "first post". Let's just say the ubuntu folks still have some work to do.
--------- I have no signature
Is EXT4 backwards compatible with EXT2 and EXT3? (3 is backwards compatible with 2) I'm asking because there are only Windows drivers for EXT2, and this could cause problems for those that dual boot.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
When will they have suspend for Linux that Actually Works.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
boots 3.1 seconds faster with ext4 over ext3
Converting an ext2 file system to ext3 takes a simple command, that runs instantly. It basically just add a flag that enable journaling.
Will ext4 be so different that it will not be possible to convert without reformatting?
That's would be a pain for the half-terabytes partitions we have today.
factor 966971: 966971
if by reformat you mean fdisk followed by an explicit mkfs.ext4 after....
You should be doing the following:
http://kernelnewbies.org/Ext4#head-3891522e0601162aab24c73c1f148a1e28c6a9d4
.. that is more than twice as long as Windows 98SE took to boot on my Athlon 1ghz in 2001. 8 years development and we're still ass-whipped by 90s technology. Way to go....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
* Ubuntu 8.10 with EXT3 filesystem boots in 31.8 seconds (on the AMD Sempron system);
* Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT3 filesystem boots in 28.3 seconds (on the AMD Sempron system);
* Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT4 filesystem boots in 23.1 seconds (on the AMD Sempron system).
* Ubuntu 8.10 with EXT3 filesystem boots in 26.8 seconds (on the Intel Core 2 Duo system);
* Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT3 filesystem boots in 24.5 seconds (on the Intel Core 2 Duo system);
* Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha (Build 20090112.1) with EXT4 filesystem boots in 21.4 seconds (on the Intel Core 2 Duo system)!
creation science book
Is EXT4 backwards compatible with EXT2 and EXT3?
Also: Does "shred" work with it? (It works with EXT3 but only if journaling is disabled - which seems to defeat the purpose of the filesystem...)
Alternatively: Is there a replacement or upgrade for "shred" that would work with EXT4 and/or other journaling filesystems, or a "shred the free blocks" IOCTL?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
They've shaved 10 seconds off the boot time? In a typical working week that buys me 50 seconds more work time. I'll be so much more productive.
Now wash your hands.
Sure to be named Masturbating Monkey
Not enough time to backup my /home and install before class starts...
My understanding is that ext4 provides some very nice features, but faster data access isn't necessarily one of them. I'd imagine that an ext2 fs, which doesn't have journaling to slow it down, should be even faster.
s = seconds
S = siemens (electrical conductance)
This is a truly disappointing news item. Instead of setting the bar higher and truly trying to reduce boot time, they have not done much more than shave seconds off the existing boot time.
For a generic desktop distro, 20+ seconds is still terribly long. 10 seconds should realistically be easy to achieve, especially as it took Arjan and me only a few months to get to 5 seconds on a netbook. We sure cut some corners, but we did not even use ext4 on those netbooks, and we still had buggy X starting times of 1.5 seconds, something which we can probably do in 0.5 seconds with kernel modesetting.
I hate to see everyone settle down with "20 seconds" being "the next 5 second boot". This is really not progress at all, but rather, complacency.
So people will work less time with Linux.
Bert
I don't mean to troll, but I could care less about boot up times. What I care about is uptime!
With Windows, you are always having to reboot the system due to everything from software installs to changing a network connection.
On Linux, I never have to reboot. Basically my desktop stays on unless I am taking a long weekend. I understand that efficiency is good, however, a fast boot-up does not seem like news to me.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
ON WHAT HARDWARE? That number is meaningless unless we know the specifications.
What exactly is the definition of boot?
When I start up my IBM ThinkPad (1.5ghz single processor, 512RAM, garbage video card) running Windows XP, it takes roughly 10-15 seconds to get to the user log-in interface from the moment the power button is pressed.
But, once you log in, you are talking two to three minutes where background applications and processes are opening, explorer is loading, and applications that launch at start are loading.
After you log in does that time count as boot time? Considering it takes me 10-15 seconds to get to the sign in screen, not that much time, but after logging in it takes well over two minutes for me to be able to actually run anything at normal capacity.
However, the good news is that the EXT4 filesystem was implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 a couple of days ago and it will be available in the Ubuntu Installer, if you choose manual partitioning.' I guess it's finally time to reformat my /home partition..."
From what I understand, there's no need to reformat. Similar to how EXT3 was layered on top of EXT2, EXT4 should just be another mount option as long as the kernel supports it.
I have a couple EXT4 partitions I'm testing... It's been rock-solid so far...
and you may get a relevant answer.
The question is what do you want the computer (or appliance) to be able to do after that four second boot? All the supporting software to do all the whizbang stuff (games, graphics, etc) takes time to load.
I decided awhile back that I simply wanted a device that I could power up quickly, surf the web, check email, oh, and had to be portable. Just last month I got such a device. It powers on instantly, finds and connects to wi-fi rapidly, the browser opens quickly, etc. It does exactly what I needed it to do. It's an IPOD Touch. First Apple product I've ever owned, so I'm not exactly an Apple advocate, but it does the bloody job.
So, back to the OP, I'll ask the same question that I ask every person who comes up and asks me what kind of computer they should get. . . . . what do you want it to do?
boot time as a whole is fuck all total delay in your time spent on a computer, so who fucking cares. lets work on larger cheaper solid state drives please.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I've been using Ubuntu for I year. I was quite happy with the 8.4, but unfortunately I've switched to 8.10 64bit (to support 4GB RAM). You know what? I couldn't care less about how fast it boots. I do, however, care about these things:
- switching from dual display to presentation (clone) and back totally messes up x config, I have to uninstall and reinstall nvidea drivers
- in dual screen mode, nautilus opens on the first display. I have to open terminal and run nautilus& to lunch it on the second display
- in dual screen mode, keyboard keeps focus in the previous screen. I have to minimize/maximize a windows on the "new" screen to move keyboard focus
- RDP client crashes X windows in some cases (it does not close the drop down list of used servers... and bang)
- oh and NO it's not AN ERROR if I close the RDP window. If I want to reconnect, I will, don't hide under my active windows and bring RDP windows back in 30 seconds. That's just plain stupid.
- java and window decorations don't play well together (popups without buttons etc.)
- How about opening a connection to a new server in a new tab, not in a new nautilus window?
- Flash stops working. I just see a gray square where flash is supposed to be.
- Firefox is not very stable.
- Windows would become gray and unresponsive when there's a lot of disk activity.
- I've seen ubuntu crash on my much more times than I've seen BSOD on the same HW.
- If i lock my computer, I want it to be locked. I don't want it to be locked for a minute or so and than display what was last on my desktop. Sure, you'd have to log in to get access, but there could be things for my eyes only on that screen. So don't you ever roll eyes on windows security, ok? You've got your own issues.
I could probably think of more but this is just a list of things I remember from the top of my head. Sure, you'll be downmoding me and say I'm trolling. Maybe I am. But my point is: there are MUCH more IMPORTANT things to fix than the FUCKING BOOT TIME. Who the fuck even cares about boot time?? Can't you just grab a coffee while it boots? What kind of idiotic metric is this?
I guess SW development is hard and complex. And we've reached a point where maintaining these beasts is hard, for either open source or commercial products.
Not intending to troll, but if suspend doesn't work for you, it's your fault for buying hardware that doesn't support ACPI in a standard enough fashion to make it work.
Go Intel. If you get an Intel-based chipset with Intel graphics, suspend works beautifully. NVIDIA nForce chipsets also work, but are slightly less reliable.
Try and not blame Linux for suspend not working. Suspend already works. If it doesn't work, your motherboard manufacturer most likely hasn't bothered testing with Linux, and finding and squashing ACPI bugs.
All you need to do is write gibberish to a file until the device is full then unlink the file, and do that repeatedly until your paranoia is satisfied.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, but at least the people make "wipe" are paranoid too:
From the wipe man page
==
NOTE ABOUT JOURNALING FILESYSTEMS AND SOME RECOMMENDATIONS (JUNE 2004)
Journaling filesystems (such as Ext3 or ReiserFS) are now being used by default by most Linux distributions. No secure deletion program that
does filesystem-level calls can sanitize files on such filesystems, because sensitive data and metadata can be written to the journal, which can-
not be readily accessed. Per-file secure deletion is better implemented in the operating system.
Encrypting a whole partition with cryptoloop, for example, does not help very much either, since there is a single key for all the partition.
Therefore wipe is best used to sanitize a harddisk before giving it to untrusted parties (i.e. sending your laptop for repair, or selling your
disk). Wiping size issues have been hopefully fixed (I apologize for the long delay).
Be aware that harddisks are quite intelligent beasts those days. They transparently remap defective blocks. This means that the disk can keep
an albeit corrupted (maybe slightly) but inaccessible and unerasable copy of some of your data. Modern disks are said to have about 100% trans-
parent remapping capacity. You can have a look at recent discussions on Slashdot.
I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this
almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Bet-
ter, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.
Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands. My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufacturers
and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.
Don't trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.
Of course this shifts the trust to the computing system, the CPU, and so on. I guess there are also "traps" in the CPU and, in fact, in every
sufficiently advanced mass-marketed chip. Wealthy nations can find those. Therefore these are mainly used for criminal investigation and "con-
trol of public dissent".
People should better think of their computing devices as facilities lended by the DHS.
==
1 second divided by 50 cycles per second is 20 milliseconds per cycle.
On my 300 Mhz 192mb Pentium 2 fuji lifebook Damn small linux boots on 25 seconds. It hardly makes a diffenence if I use the CD or install it on the HD.
Interestingly, on a modern computer it takes almost the same amount of time.
So I'm guessing most of that time has to do with a combination of device initializations and timeouts, and disk I/O
ubuntu takes about 15 minutes to boot off CD on the computer.
So one reason you don't have a 1 second booting computer is that if you ever did get the boot under 25 seconds all that is going to happen is that since that is plenty fast, people will lard the thing back up with new features to bring it back to 25 seconds.
One thing I always enjoy about boot ups is that it sort of reminds me of the way a developing fetus goes through all these steps that resemble the vestigial characteristics of more primitive animals. On my mac you see the hardware checks then the boot loader then the services come on, and the screen change to one color of blue, then a slightly different hue, then it gets graphics. etc.... It's like recapitulating it's development in a way that is alive at every point along the way.
If you want something faster I think you need to discard the layered boot. Have a direct boot to the final state instead of bootstrapping one layer from the next.
How does an iphone pull it off? Afterall it is running OSX and on a slow PCU to boot (pun).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The expression is "I Couldn't care less" i. bloody e. You are expressing utter contempt, there is nothing below whatever you are professing not to care about.
"I could care less": Yes this is almost, maybe 30%, possibly 73.2%, up my list of hates, apart from purple feathers though, but then I'm a bit airy-fairy anyway.
PS
Only if you don't know what you are doing, I'm actually posting from a winXP machine, which has been up since April 2004, because updates are turned off, all paths to Microsoft are blocked by my firewall, I don't install stuff I don't need & use Opera & Eudora.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
You can preallocate on ext3 by doing
dd if=/dev/zero of=$OUT_PATH bs=1024 seek=$SIZE count=1
No funky system call required.
Which is still twice the time my old Linux installation boots.
It's exact 10.4 seconds from pressing enter at grub to a USABLE and fully finished X.
How? Customized startup scripts based upon really old RedHat ones, customized kernel, custom compiled everything for my architecture, no fluff or graphical bootup, and fluxbox as WM.
There's not even funny prefetch stuff going on.
I'm sorry - not impressed.
Whatever improvements the Ubuntu crew make to their boot times will be basically irrelevant until they fix the problem with it wanting to check your disks *right then, when you're trying to use the computer* once a month (and then whinging about it until you let the disk check run).
Why they haven't fixed such a glaring deficiency in usability with an AutoFsck style solution that defers the actual disk check until after shutdown (you know, when I'm actually done with the computer) is something I just don't understand...
In daily use I use mac, linux and windows. 99% of the time these are in some form of suspend mode. Booting your computer is virtually a thing of the past for me, I couldn't care less if it took 60 or 6 seconds to boot really. Things like hybrid or safe sleep remove the risk of data loss due to power failure too. The most important thing to me is that sleep is instant and reliable and it has taken OSs a long time to get there. Mac OS I find to be the most reliable and quickest (but given the significant advantage of limited hardware set and the fact that apple write all the kernel drivers), Windows is fairly good with most hardware and Vista is almost as quick as Mac OS. Linux is catching up fast, I have an EEE PC running Ubuntu 8.10 and it is *almost* instantaneous (still get a blinking cursor before the X server comes back to life) but I've found reliability to still be a bit of an issue.
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS144846+15-Apr-2008+PRN20080415
"QNX Achieves Boot Times in Milliseconds on the Intel(R) Atom(TM) Processor Z500 Series"
FFS people, just hibernate or if you really need minimal boot time, put it on standby.
Don't give me that rubbish about how these power saving modes don't work reliably. They work fine in Vista (for me anyway, heck they work fine for me in Ubuntu), and resuming from hibernation is much faster than Ubuntu's startup time. If they don't work on your Linux rig, well sucks to be you, but that doesn't mean your hardware isn't capable of it, just your distro for whatever reason.
Flamebait post, perhaps, but I wish people would appreciate the fact that fast boots are completely feasible these days, just not necessarily from a cold boot.
Changing the network configuration hasn't required a reboot since Windows desktop OSes merged with NT. Windows 2000 didn't require a reboot just to change the network settings.
Most software also doesn't require a reboot either.
Even OS X requires a reboot when you install system updates.
Unless you can restart the OS without restarting the computer every OS is going to require occasional reboots when major changes are made to the OS.
I have Windows XP on a Dual Core Athlon 64bit processor and it boots in under a minute. Most of the boot time for a system is spent loading up all kinds of user software and drivers.
Work Safe Porn
One of the great things about Linux is that you hardly ever have to boot at all... My home server has gone months at a time without any rebooting. Shaving 5 seconds off boot (as it seems would happen moving from 8.10 to 9.04 on a Core 2 Duo system) will save me around 5 seconds/month. That's one extra slashdot summary.
Now, an unstable O/S like Windows, then boot time matters. You might be saving a few minutes a day with those kinds of numbers. There's a serious productivity gain.
You know when germany went through hyperinflation and had to use wheelbarrows to carry around money, i'm sure you've seen pictures.
Precisely.
I particularly liked the one with the kids' snow fort built out of bales of money. Though the woman feeding her furnace with bundles of money because it produced more heat than the fuel it could buy was classic.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
All you need to do is write gibberish to a file until the device is full then unlink the file, and do that repeatedly until your paranoia is satisfied.
Which risks hanging things every time the partition fills up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
remember its not how long an OS takes to boot that matters its how attractive the graphics are during bootup........if you run a stream of porn across my screen I don't care if windows takes 2 hours to boot up......
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
I have XP on my desktop, and I'd say I have a usable work environment in less than 20 seconds from the moment I hit the power button. That's on a Core2Duo with 2 gigs of RAM.
Read Pynchon.
I probably have to reboot every month or two. Or have you forgotten of the concept of a kernel update?
Karma: Non-Heinous
Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands. My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufacturers
and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.
Seriously WTF?
Break out the tin-foil hats everyone. Those mafia hackers are on the loose!
People should better think of their computing devices as facilities
lended by the DHS.
Ah huh. My computer is trying to send me to gitmo. Got it.
Worse is that this tripe is in the wipe manpage. rense.com-style conspiracy theories have no place in an OS trying to establish its market credibility.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
Yeah well you can do it offline, or you can probably cross your fingers and hope to survive a transient ENOSPC condition. It happens to desktop users all the time, accidentally.
21,4 seconds is about the time I get on my notebook from grub to kdm login (kernel 2.6.28, openrc and ext4). I have Core2Duo 7250, 2Gb RAM and 5400rpm hard drive. The latter is a show-stopper here. I don't think I'd boot much slower with slower CPU or less RAM, but I'd get much better result with a fast SSD.
My understanding was that ext4 doesn't really provide much over the old ext3. Just like ext3 isn't much different than ext2. With even low-end filesystems now over 500GB, I can't imagine why anyone would want to sit through an fsck on something like that.
What really sucks is that 2.6.28 still appears to have the md RAID (SMP?) bug where the system can freeze when it gets under high I/O load (BUG: soft lockup). This makes high-load servers almost completely impossible. I don't know if it's an Ubuntu thing or what.
...KDE Klansman and Licking Lesbian.
My local system would lock up and hang for MINUTES while it timed out on requests to the NFS server. I could never understand why the thing didn't just time out in seconds rather than minutes.
This was the default setting: hard mounts. If the server went away the NFS client was told to hang so that any program trying to access the export would block to minimize the chance of data corruption. Once the NFS server came back, things unblocked.
You can of course configure NFS clients to use soft mounts, so that an error is returned to the process that was calling read() or write(2), and you would simply hope that the application code did error checking.
It was possible to mix hard and soft mounts on one clients. Soft mounts were often used on read-only file systems (/usr/local), since you didn't have to worry about corruption of write()s.
The time it took for an NFS client to stop retrying and throw an error was also configurable per site policy (as were/are most Unix system things).
If a web browser/office suit/file manager takes four seconds to be usable, something is wrong with it.
If that is an open source project which is bundled with a "fast" operating system, that bundle should take the speed of its most frequently-accessed bundled apps into account when declaring itself speedy.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Just for clarification purposes, this story needs the tag: !murdersyourwife
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ronocdh/2651155110/sizes/o/
But how fast will it be once they add all the DRM into it?????
I'm impressed with this improvement, although it will obviously vary with hardware. Linuxbios will make things better... Also, I've found that boot speed isn't really affected by hard drive speeds (I have a solidstate). It's more to do with post time, kernel size (and compile your own freaking kernel...and use the Zen kernel if you know what's good for you), whether the modules are built in, and other such factors. That said, Ubuntu doesn't beat my 12-15 sec boot time in Archlinux. That said, it is heavily customized.
when my MSDOS 6.22 & Windows for Workgroups was into Program Manager with no thrashing in 22 seconds. (On average with my 386SX-25 & 4MB RAM)
Honestly, who shuts a computer down anymore? Even if you do, is starting it back up in the morning such a huge drain?
I just let mine go to sleep...
At work, I have a Dell Latitude D610 in a docking station with dual 19" monitors. I keep it on overnight and simply lock the screen, so I can be logged on and working within seconds.
This past weekend, electrical work in the building forced me to shut down the computer. From the time I hit the power button, it was 10 minutes from pushing the power button to seeing the XP desktop. A mere few seconds of that was me typing my password.
You want booting in one second? Try a Commodore 64. You could probably have most software loaded off a 5.25 disk within a minute or so.
So this is just question about the default configuration of software system when testing Ubuntu's next release.
The OS boot time on Ubuntu is under one second, no matter of what. But the whole system to boot to login screen, it depends from what system services you are running what INIT needs to start and how it process them.
Well, this test was not about "hey! Ubuntu boots under Xx.x second" but just that Ext4 speed is better than Ext3 and you can get much better tests for that from web. You do not need Ubuntu FOR THAT!
So the whole article is just Ubuntu marketing, not about Linux OS speed on Ubuntu system, not about Ext4 file system what hit stable on 2.6.28 version of Linux OS, but only about how great "improvement" is about on Ubuntu. You get much faster boot to login when you turn off few system services and especially the GDM/KDM and you take only the shell with the OS to start. It is question about how you configure your system on boot, not how you configure your Linux OS on that system.
The modern OS's boots damn fast, it gets started by bootloader, loaded as whole to RAM and then it starts first userspace application and after that, you just count seconds OR minutes of the system start time to login screen or desktop...
Everyone could make that easily worst boottime just by enabling few applications as system services and start before other important system services. Like place the Open Office to to start as service and you get 10 seconds added to boottime. Then place computer to calculate heavy mathematic calculations and you can even push the system boot time over 10 minutes if you want and all that time the OS was booted in one second.
Aparently booting in less than a second is possible! Suspending a computer is (in some aspects) related to hibernating; however, you would need to get the bios chip & hard drive to maintain their exact state while powering off the computer. When you turn it back on, that exact state is restored; desktop, applications, maybe even IP address. Popular Science Magazine showcased this idea a few months ago. It definitely sounds plausible, wonder if those researchers have gotten any closer by now.
burst out laugh when I saw someone doing the math calculating by booting 10s faster how much money is saved. TALK TO VISTA GUYS ABOUT THAT! My working computer used to have Vista installed on it. It is a HP 2-Way Opteron with 4GB ECC ram and ST 7200.10 320GB HDD. After pressing the power button, I go out to have a cup of coffee, read some papers and come back to enter my password. After that, I went to the office beside and have a little chat, then back to my station so I can do anything useful on it. And it's a real story!
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
Bootbooster caches various bits of the BIOS probing to the disk and allows the Eee to finish the BIOS phase faster than normal (providing you are booting off the internal SSD). The link is slightly inaccurate in so much as it doesn't speed up grub but instead cuts the time it takes to get to grub.
The more tolerance you build into the hardware the cheaper it is to mass produce (because you throw out less during QCing). So you run a loop to keep trying so people don't return something that sorta works.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Button depressed, or end of bios?
Because, if its from the button being pressed, it's far more impressive.
If it's from the bios end, then it's pretty lame.
My 486 DX2 oc'd to 80mhz, 16mb ram, 512kb cache, running Win95a and a 400mb WD HDD used to boot to the desktop in 43seconds from power on.
How is it that current OS' are still as slow as this despite having many many times the performance?
Driver probing isn't really why it's slow. Even without Arjan van de Van's fastboot kernel work probing for hardware* and loading drivers is not usually not what takes the most time during boot.
Typically boot time is dominated by the time it takes to actually read data from the disk (so disk seek time is a factor - especially if you aren't using readahead). Secondary to that is the time to start services. Assuming you are booting something graphical desktop environments (GNOME/KDE) take a bit of time to start too followed by X itself (this might be fixed now if you have kernel mode setting).
The above is excluding the BIOS boot time by the way - those can vary dramatically too. I've seen some servers that take many times longer to boot from cold past the BIOS than a typical desktop system takes to finish booting from poweroff all the way to a started Firefox.
* So long as we aren't talking about servers which may have large numbers of spun down disks or a big SCSI bus that takes time to enumerate etc.
I admit I haven't checked this recently but isn't DSL using squashfs which is a compressed filesystem? If so that 50Mbytes is going to have to be uncompressed and that's going to take up precious time in that one second boot...
It's absolutely true that Linux has a terrible time suspending to RAM (or coming back from suspend) on certain hardware. It has DEFINITELY been improving over the past two years though (one of my systems was fixed around 9 months ago).
First up make sure you are using the latest kernel you can (new fixes for suspend issues seem to have gone into each of the past few kernel releases including the very latest one). If you have the time you might be able to use the OpenSUSE instructions on debugging suspend to RAM to isolate where the fault lies.
Assuming the problem is more than monitor being off (i.e. the system is completely hanging without any binary only drivers being loaded) if you know how to run the very latest kernels (a prerelease 2.6.29) could you file a bug report over on Kernel Bugzilla after you've checked out the Linux kernel suspend debugging howto?
A while back you mentioned about the USB probing could be made faster (and asked why I was using pciehp). Well you were right USB probing DID get faster (boot tracing SVG of EeePC 900) and I no longer need pciehp on my EeePC 900.
I bet that making the kernel more asynchronous than it already is (with the current async patches) won't save any more significant amounts of time on this particular setup though! : )
It sounds like the default configuration uses screenshots as input for the various screensavers. This is not a good default, if it's really set up like this. On the other hand, there's a reported bug where nVidia drivers cause the screensaver to be transparent--the desktop is visible behind it. So maybe it's that particular issue. (If it is, someone who's seeing it should confirm that it's still present.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Nearly everyone else working on it is a volunteer doing it in their spare time. We're working on it, I assure you. If a bug report exists, that's important to know. If there's a workaround, it may still be that there's a usability issue and that's valid. If it's a problem with your hardware, what on earth do you expect them to do about it? If you can live without your shiny 3D eye-candy (or buying an Intel graphics card), you don't run into the evil-hardware-company issue.
And lastly, the quickest way to fix an issue is to provide a patch. That's not really fair, but, given that you're not paying anyone for the software, that's the way it is. (That doesn't mean that someone who tells you that the only reason you're not a happy user is that you haven't written enough patches isn't a tremendous jerk.) I've gone from filing bugs, to confirming and testing them, to writing my own patches and testcases. It's rewarding, in its own way, to make the system better, bit by bit.
Honestly, the situation on the Ubuntu tracker isn't that bad. Yes, there are still people who drop into ignored bug reports, ask "Is it still present?" and set the bug to expire if someone doesn't write back that, yes, the bug is still present in the current version, as (in plenty of cases) the owner could see if they just took five minutes to test it. Yes, there's no good way to escalate a bug or get it triaged with a quickness, even if it's something that's really damned important. Given how bad things are at the GNOME bugzilla (bugs wait forever there), I'm pleased in comparison.
Given all this, it's understandable that Linux isn't for everyone. Hell, look at the state of audio support. It's a damned tragedy. You have to really love it at this point. I'm motivated by the fact that it's worlds better than it was only a few years ago: suspend/resume actually works sometimes, a major vendor (Intel) actually maintains bleeding-edge open-source video drivers as part of the X.org distribution, and there's a lot more polish on things--all the little usability details that sound like nitpicking when you enumerate them, but add up to a good or bad user experience, in the final evaluation. You may have left Linux--and, really, if you're not willing to put up with quite a bit at this point, it's not for you--but it's not a failure.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You may be able to mount ext3 as ext4, but you won't get the cool new features like extents. From Converting an ext3 filesystem to ext4, it is easy to enable these features without a reformat. You may want a plain ext3 /boot partition for compatibility with older versions of GRUB, but it looks like the GRUB for Jaunty will support ext4, so a separate /boot partition may not be necessary.
This post is TOTALLY offtopic. Really you need to split these up and file them as bug reports over on launchpad. I'll post a couple of comments answers but I'm not going to follow up on any of this (even if you answer any questions I ask).
- switching from dual display to presentation (clone) and back totally messes up x config, I have to uninstall and reinstall nvidea drivers
Talk to NVIDIA (Linux web forum) about this. It's their code you're running and they are probably the only ones who are willing to fix it.
- in dual screen mode, nautilus opens on the first display. I have to open terminal and run nautilus& to lunch it on the second display
You can't drag it? I don't quite understand...
- in dual screen mode, keyboard keeps focus in the previous screen. I have to minimize/maximize a windows on the "new" screen to move keyboard focus
Are you using desktop effects? (Do windows fade and slide etc?) If so this sounds like a bug in compiz...
- RDP client crashes X windows in some cases (it does not close the drop down list of used servers... and bang)
Hmm. I'm really curious now as to whether you are using compiz. Regardless your best bet with this one would be to be to see if you can capture a backtrace of the crash with debug symbols and to file a bug report against the RDP client (I'm guessing you're using tsclient) in launchpad.
- oh and NO it's not AN ERROR if I close the RDP window. If I want to reconnect, I will, don't hide under my active windows and bring RDP windows back in 30 seconds. That's just plain stupid.
I guess file an enhancement request on tsclient in launchpad.
- java and window decorations don't play well together (popups without buttons etc.)
I really would like to know whether you are using compiz. If you are I have a feeling this was a known "bug" in the Java bug database for a long time but the fix is not yet in Ubuntu.
- How about opening a connection to a new server in a new tab, not in a new nautilus window?
Hmm probably best to file an enhancement request over on the GNOME bugzilla.
- Flash stops working. I just see a gray square where flash is supposed to be.
64 bit Firefox using 32 bit Flash via nspluginwrapper I'm guessing. There is a 64bit Linux Flash plugin that is in very early beta that MAY work better for you (I've heard mixed things mind). Also make sure you're using Flash 10 whatever route you are taking.
- Firefox is not very stable.
Might be because of extensions or plugins or you may have found a problem page or your memory might be faulty or Firefox might be buggy or... You are going to have to sit down and capture the issue in Firefox this then file a bug report in launchpad.
- Windows would become gray and unresponsive when there's a lot of disk activity.
You're using compiz aren't you? The greying is compiz telling you that the window HAS become unresponsive! As to why this is happening on I/O it probably varies from program to program. Too little information to many possibilities to say more.
- I've seen ubuntu crash on my much more times than I've seen BSOD on the same HW.
Quite possible. I've seen Linux stable on some computers and fla
Your boot is going to have to be sequential until you have decompressed ALL the data though. At only 50Mbytes your CPU is probably going to be stalled longer doing the decompression than waiting for 100Mbytes off your storage medium in our mythical one second boot (unless single CPU speeds get incredibly fast). You also can't make use of execute in place.
Using compression in the fashion you are suggesting is only a win if you are avoiding the slowness of reading in the data (e.g. by avoiding disk seeks due to having less data). As it stands you are probably going to cycle the RAM caches with all that decompression too...
OK, it's not that important, but why the Debain symbol? This is a story about Ubuntu, yes it's a Debain derivative, but this article is not about some pre=release of Debian booting in x seconds it's about an Ubuntu alpha.
And when we get to Zippy Zebra sometime in 2017, the world will end and it will still take more than 20 seconds to boot.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Why this obsession with boot speed? I have a very, very simple solution: I never turn my machines off. Linux is stable enough to run 24/7, there is no reason to turn them off. Problem solved.
You switched from LTS to normal. I also installed 8.10 for my dad, because I wanted OpenOffice 3. Now I have some strage problems as well. The Xserver resolution is all messed up at the login. I can't even read anything on the login screen. It was easy enough to change screen resolution on the desktop. But for some reason Ubuntu 8.10 does not apply that resolution to the login.
To make a long story short: I got OpenOffice 2.4 on Ubuntu 8.10 even though I only have 8.10 sources in my sources list. Crappy, isn't it?
...a name change to "Insta-Buntu" is currently being evaluated for the upcoming release 9.04 :-)
is 21.4 seconds fast?
My Arch Linux boots in 33 seconds (that's from GRUB beginning to boot the kernel, to the login prompt). And it's in a virtual machine.
Wake me up when you managed to boot in 3 seconds.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Do you also leave your shower running, and subsequently not need to care about the warm-up time?
Do you also leave your TV on, so you can see what's on the instant you walk in the room?
Did you throw out your electric kettle and replace it with a thermostatic boiler so that you don't have to wait a minute for a hot drink?
If we're ever to get our Year of Linux on the Desktop then the 99.9% of the population that aren't geeks, care about the environment and their electricity build will turn on their computer when they want to do something, and turn it off when they're finished.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
The new Microsoft OS 6.22 boots almost instantly.
It's brand new utility offers you the ability to DOUBLE your hard drive size.
With it's new extended memory manager, you can address even larger memory sizes than ever before.
With the new transfer software Interlink you are able to ditch all of that expensive network architecture.
Now for a while they were selling it for 49.99, but today you can get it for free directly from the manufacture.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=96cc3197-b7e5-4b31-badb-ddaac771295f&DisplayLang=en
Startup can be one of three experiences; boot, resume from sleep, or resume from hibernate. Although resume from sleep is the default, and often 2 to 5 seconds based on common hardware and standard software loads, this post is primarily about boot as that experience has been commented on frequently. For Windows 7, a top goal is to significantly increase the number of systems that experience very good boot times. In the lab, a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds.
Windows Vista SP1 data indicates that roughly 35% of systems boot in 30 seconds or less, 75% of systems boot in 50 seconds or less. The Vista SP1 data is real world telemetry data. It comes to us from the very large number of systems (millions) where users have chosen to send anonymous data to Microsoft via the Customer Experience Improvement Program.
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/08/29/boot-performance.aspx
From the same wikipedia post:
Ext4 has an online defragmenter. Even with the various techniques used to avoid it, a long lived file system does tend to become fragmented over time. ext4 will have a tool which can defragment individual files or entire file systems.
Peter Norton is going to love this! Norton Defrag for Linux coming in 3,2,1...
Use tune2fs (assuming you're currently using ext2/3): http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto#Converting_an_ext3_filesystem_to_ext4
Also, you can convert an ext3 filesystem in-place to Btrfs: http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Conversion_from_Ext3
My 3 years old Windows XP PC boots in 6 seconds (from power button to desktop usable and hard drive has stopped being busy!). No fancy hardware except maybe a dumb stripping raid0 from 2x250gb SATA2 drives and a customized/optimized OS configuration. This is a computer used for large range of activities: gaming, movies, music, internet, programming. On a modern/good/sshd PC and if I put my hands on it seriously I bet I can reduce it under 4 seconds.
I remember a guy who customized his Gentoo 6 years ago to boot under 10 seconds as well.
So whats with this hype for a lousy 21.4 on today's hardware?
Since Ubuntu Ibex (8.10) came out it can take me up to about 10 attempts to boot my bloody Ubuntu box at all (problem with SATA).
Then once it is booted X doesn't drive my monitor at the correct refresh rate (keep getting told this will definitely "just work" in the next version) and there's nothing I can set that will correct this.
Finally audio and video stutters so badly it's not worth using as a desktop at all (still using it as a fileserver thanks to it having 2 x 750Gb SATA drives).
Sadly my experience is that Ubuntu is turning into a train wreck. Personally I don't give two hoots if it takes 10 minutes to boot just as long as when it does it bloody well works.
1 second later I am typing in Word. That, and email, are pretty much all I use it for, but I use it for that all the time. I bet there are still some journalists out there using the Radio Shack 100 (or whatever it was called) with a 1 or 2 line display, booting in 1 second, running on 2 AA's forever. When I can get a netbook that boots in a second or 2, running linux I presume, than I'll buy one. Don't try to tell me about standby (uses battery power) or hibernate (still takes a long time to resume).
Doug Jensen
This kind of always irked me. Why can't there be a way to convert a partition to Ext4 from whatever-it-might-be without having to reformat? For instance, FAT can be converted to NTFS (I know this example sucks, but give me a break, I'm reaching here), so why can't there be a convert for Ext2/3 to 4? Surely, this has to be something that is "doable."
Ubuntu 9.04 boots 13% faster with ext4 than with ext3
or using the AMD Sempron data:
Ubuntu 9.04 boots 18% faster with ext4 than with ext3
If the boot time with ext3 was one hour, 3.1 seconds would be pretty unimpressive, and if ext3 took 3.2 seconds ext4 would be the bestest filesystem ever. Absolute differences are mostly meaningless.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
Some of us are generating our own power from renewable resources, so we feel it is phenomenally stupid to waste power on a machine we're not using.
Obese city dwellers will not understand; if you are in that category please return to your petroleum-based cheese dip, I apologise for interrupting your wasted life.
As an aside, lithium batteries typically burst into flame during the charging cycle, so reducing the amount of time a laptop spends charging slightly decreases the likelihood of burning down your house.
If we define boot time by when the login window sleeps, we could technically boot really quickly if the bootsplash was a login window... (although this isn't necessarily a bad idea, so you can login at your leisure without slowing the boot.)
Grub to GDM for me is about 15 seconds. My desktop is pretty heavy to it takes another 15 seconds to completely load after I login.
Time makes more converts than reason
One minor issue is that this will leave existing data in the previous format, so you might get better performance if you reformat, or at least copy your old data around.
Clearly, then, the people that wrote the wipe manpage aren't working on an OS trying to establish its market credibility.
Free Unix (all the software: Linux, the BSDs, GNU, KDE, Perl, etc) isn't trying to do anything. It's just code. People that write code and contribute it have their own reasons and motivations. People working for Red Hat and Novell are trying to establish the market credibility of Free Unix (or at least their brands of it). But there's no reason that just because those companies use some geeks' code that those geeks share the marketing goals of the companies. If Red Hat wants their manpages to sound professional, they should review and rewrite as necessary. It's (usually) allowed by the license. Same thing for Ubuntu if they want user-friendly manpages. If either group can't get changes adopted upstream, they can either fork or maintain a patch set. Neither is as much work as writing the software from scratch, so they've still managed to benefit from the work of the paranoid geeks. Just as those same geeks likely benefit from their work.
I'm sorry to say that this is not a satisfactory answer. Look around the net - hey, just stay on this site and click on a random link - and you'll see that various Desktop versions of Linux are portrayed as nothing less than perfection. Me and the people around me who have tried the same software (I'm talking 13 years in my case) must be subjected to some strange phenomenon where the most simple tasks seem to require RSI-inducing terminal typing. Fix one thing, something else breaks. Update and things go bonkers. Disable update and ... it updates. Reboot to get sound. Recompile to get wifi. Repeat.
You may not believe this, but few things piss me off more than mindless fanboyism, and I say this as a Linux diehard. It leads to terrible disappointment for users who find out that, yes, it's still got a ton of problems.
It's 2009, people. Multimedia is ubiquitous, no matter how complex these peripherals are, each and every common-sensed consumer expects them to work without a problem and does not wish to lose time on it. Truth is that the best Ubuntu experience is the one where you have a Windows box running a foot further on the desk, so you can scroll through an avalanche of third-rate forums and half-arsed wikis to find some obscure sequence of terminal commands. In most cases you're trying to find out how to run a windows look-a-like tool or package in your newly found time consumer. Consumers want this and that. Don't discuss with them whether or not they need it. I'm hinting at a very wide range of issues here, going from drawing squares in Gimp to having flash whilst browsing.
I know I may seem like a broken record here, but the developers can't fix the problem if they're unaware of it. Developers get into habits of using a program a particular way, and without users providing feedback in the form of bug reports with explicit instructions on reproducing the bug, they won't become aware of it.
I know, I know, most people have better things to do with their time than file bugs, and this is why I don't recommend the OS to people who don't fiddle with computers as their primary occupation.
As for Flash... well, that's the problem when you try and mix proprietary and free software. X.org/PulseAudio/Firefox developers point the finger at Flash as the source of the suckiness, while Flash developers (presumably) point at X.org/PulseAudio/Firefox. The best free solution is reportedly swfdec, but it's not going to be as good as proprietary Flash, at least not for a while. (Reportedly, it plays YouTube, at least.)
Most of the energy isn't put into bug resolving, btw. The average Ubuntu dev works on polish and gloss, like this incredible progress in boot time.
I don't think that's quite fair--it's a false dichotomy. The major change in boot time comes from enabling the new ext4 filesystem; it's not plausible to assume that Ted Ts'o and everyone else who's been working on the kernel would be making your Flash work properly if they hadn't been doing that.
If there's one thing that's possible to learn in the history of operating systems: apps kill competition, not OSs. No applications ? No carrot!
We don't have a working browser in Ubuntu because everyone warped the system enough to get Internet Explorer working via IEs4Linux; we have a working browser because of Firefox. Similarly, the Flash problem won't be solved by any amount of fiddling on Adobe's part, or by any amount of work from the PulseAudio crew. It'll be solved when swfdec (or maybe Gnash) can finally step in as replacements.
Excuses are the trademark of FOSS, not freedom, not liberty, not whatever third-world slogan they can come up with. Excuses are what you normally get for complaining about FOSS. They vary from "your fault", "worksforme", "their fa
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
X is supposed to be bulletproof--it's supposed to at least get you to a working login screen no matter what. File a bug; the developers may not be aware of the situation. They'll likely ask for some more information and testing on your part, so please keep an eye on the report after you file it.
I know I'm asking you to do some work, but good bug reports are the primary means by which problems get fixed. The developers probably don't know that the system is broken on your hardware, because they don't have a copy of your hardware on which to test it. You're not just helping yourself out; you're helping everyone else who might run into the same problem in the future.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Unless you have highly trusted human security guards posted around your computer 24-hours a day, you don't need to worry about secret IDE/SCSI commands planted by the government. If an organization as powerful as a government or large criminal organization (heh, same thing, right! :-P) wanted your data, they would have them. While you are away, they have physical access and could easily bug your computer, install a hardware keylogger, and so on, to get access. Or worse, they get out the rubber hoses.
Locks won't work either. You need real trusted, human eyes at all times. Locks are inconvenient enough to keep away a petty thief -- or make them gain access to your belongings by a cheaper method like smashing a window -- but are generally trivial to pick.
If your data are so important that it is under live guard, it's probably so important you would physically shred the hard drive anyway, secret IDE/SCSI be damned.
Encrypting a whole partition with cryptoloop, for example, does not help very much either, since there is a single key for all the partition.
... doesn't make any sense. There's nothing wrong with having a single key as long as it's a good key and kept well-secured. If you do this, and also take care to make sure that your swap is encrypted, then you eliminate all of the issues with hard drive sector remapping, etc. You also eliminate any need for "wipe". Just destroy all copies of the key, and the data is gone.
Of course, there is no protection from the DHS-installed transmitter in your CPU.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
why the debian logo? doesn't ubuntu have its own logo?
Faraday cage? Only bringing data to and from the computer via sneakernet?
Of course I'm not that paranoid. I don't bother with encrypting my files or anything like that. The most sensitive info on my computers is some MAFIAA content I could get sued over. Anything I really don't want getting out (Ideas for grant proposals, passwords I can't be bothered to memorize, etc.) goes straight from my brain to a little book (that I handmade from a cigarette pack, reflective tape, and old computer paper) which I keep in my wallet that's never more then a couple yards away from me.
This especially works for me because I'm a bit OCD about keeping track of my stuff. I'd still be on a 12 year old wallet if I hadn't decided to finally replace it a few weeks ago (and I still kept the old one in my arts and crafts drawer to be reincarnated as part of something else).
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
and a little samba server on it, and you will have access to whatever you use on linux from windows (at an acceptable performance). LVM and SoftRAID work too.
it all depends on how you define boot, and how many layers of a 'modern' GUI, and services, you want on top that OS.
I don't think you are ever going to get sub 1 second boots from *power down*, but if you were around in the old days, booting an Atari ST to full GEM desktop didn't take but a few seconds from ROM. Not much longer from disk.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Clearly, then, the people that wrote the wipe manpage aren't working on an OS trying to establish its market credibility.
And that's their prerogative. I couldn't care less if they wrote a manpage that included ASCII-art pr0n.
People working for Red Hat and Novell are trying to establish the market credibility of Free Unix (or at least their brands of it). If Red Hat wants their manpages to sound professional, they should review and rewrite as necessary. It's (usually) allowed by the license. Same thing for Ubuntu if they want user-friendly manpages
Which is precisely my point. Ubuntu *is* trying to establish Linux's market credibility, and this paranoid delusion is included in the Ubuntu manpage for wipe.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
In my opinion it's just lack of competition. The Windows standard for running apps needs to become a fully documented public, free work so that competing OS manufacturers can finally start showing up. Then you'll get great boot times.
Vista is a crime but in a competitive market it would have been a blip everyone ignored for other, better competitors. Ubuntu with Wine is almost there but still too complex for your average user with a Windows software install CD and without a clue.
My new desktop boots current Mandriva Cooker x86-64, from lilo to gdm, in 16 seconds. And a full working GNOME desktop with Firefox running takes about 25.
Of course, it's a heavily overclocked quad-core system with a pretty fast disk drive and 4GB of RAM.
Point being, random raw numbers (21.4 seconds!!!) don't mean an awful lot. Hardware is rather important. The original story's a good one - it explains the hardware used to test, and carefully compares ext3 and ext4, which is what they were actually trying to do. But Slashdot's abstraction of it is crap.
But MacOS X doesn't have GDM (or ironically, X) so this thread still hasn't defined a "fair" comparison between Ubuntu and MacOS X boot times.
Experience says that Samba usually is the "easiest" way (especially if some smidgen of security beyond IP address is needed). Don't forget if Samba notices another Samba system at the other end it enables some extensions. The alternative is going down the NFS v4 massive configuration route.
If you don't care about speed and are in Linux (or OSX... kinda) only environment and you mean ad-hoc (rather than log in) shares, sshfs is pretty easy to get going with recent distros. However, the moment you also need to share to Windows it's better to do the Samba dance.
The POST a typical non-server grade system does some very weak memory tests. In all the cases I've seen of bad RAM in the past few years the POST never said anything. Skipping the memory check would be no big loss.
If you suspect your memory really is bad, run a proper memory checker. They catch far more memory faults than the POST does,
How about the have it resume from disk each time. That would bring you to the login screen in 15 seconds! Have a special swap partition that resumes to the login screen.
OSX does have a login window. I don't know what it's called, but either way, I'm looking at it right now.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
This tread is going round in circles. It isn't fair to require that Linux load GDM (rather than just display a login window onto the frame buffer with out loading X, kind of like a bootsplash), while allowing MacOS X to display anything that look like a login window. Now maybe Mac OS X is at an equivalent stage in the boot process when it reaches the login window as Linux is when it reaches GDM, but it is very hard to define an equivalent stage of the boot process between two entirely different OS's. FYI, I suggested replacing the bootsplash with a tiny program like a login screen: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/10735/