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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..."

13 of 654 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by rgbe · · Score: 4, Informative

    I agree totally. 21.4 seconds is incredibly slow, and that's only to get to the login screen... which is typically only half way. I know that it is possible to boot Linux in 5 seconds for some special cases. However, the boot time should be even quicker.

  2. Re:Oh YEAH? by natebarney · · Score: 5, Informative

    Maybe my math is wrong, but wouldn't that be 1 / (50 Hz) = 20ms?

  3. Why reformat? by McNihil · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  4. I hate to say it but.... by CdBee · · Score: 3, Informative

    .. 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
  5. Comparison times from article by mgkimsal2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    * 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)!

  6. Re:reformat? by Shikaku · · Score: 4, Informative
  7. Re:Backwards Compatible? by linuxkrn · · Score: 5, Informative

    For most users, no it will not work. One of the major features of ext4 is extents, which basically reserves space for a file to continue writing at a later date. This will decrease file fragmentation and improve performance.

    If however, you disable extents, then yes you can mount it as ext3. And as you know, ext3 can be mounted as ext2 without the journaling.

    I agree that the win32 ext2 drivers need updating. I would hate to lose access to ext partitions for dual boot systems.

  8. Re:Let me get this of my chest... by Shikaku · · Score: 4, Informative

    Almost all of those issues are from third party software.

    Nvidia is notorious for awful drivers, especially for dual display. The screensaver issue is also probably from bad Nvidia drivers.

    Adobe Flash is unstable in Firefox, especially on 64 bit systems. Open Source alternatives are also very outdated and slow.

    Third party plugins like Java and Flash can make Firefox have to wait. The Mozilla team needs to design much less dependency on plugins and more of a sandbox model, so that a crash or hang of a plugin will not freeze all of Firefox.

    Programs become unresponsive due to a lot of disk activity for reasons of speed; DiskIO has more priority. This is a GUI design problem and it should be decidable/configurable easily on or after install.

  9. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 4, Informative

    The PCI spec also has required delays from power good to reset negated and then another required delay from reset negated to first configuration access. The second delay alone is about 1 sec (2^25 clock cycles).

  10. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Informative

    The BIOS. The BIOS is pretty much the sole reason PCs take so long to boot.

    Regarding Coreboot (was: LinuxBIOS):

    The Linux BIOS replaces the normal BIOS found on PCs and other machines. The BIOS boot and setup is eliminated and replaced by a very simple initialization phase, followed by a gunzip of a Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is then started and from there on the boot proceeds as normal. Amongst many other things, it provides a very fast boot time: 3 seconds from power-on to Linux console

    It doesn't have to be slow.

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  11. NFS hard mounts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  12. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by Kent+Recal · · Score: 4, Informative

    Use your common sense.
    "Boot time" obviously refers to the time that the user is waiting for the machine and not the other way round.
    And "usable desktop" is obviously the point in time when the user can begin launching his applications without significant slowdowns from boot-tasks still grinding in the background.

    This is obviously always an apples-to-oranges comparison but with just a tiny bit of common sense it can still be more meaningful than "OSX boots in 4 seconds".

  13. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by debatem1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    For cold boot to be as fast as hibernate, it would have to be able to run through the bootloader, do hardware detection, and generate a system image as fast as your system could copy one into ram. It's like trying to write a book versus trying to read one. Well parallelized init processes, cool hardware tricks, and bootloader shenanigans can get you pretty close to it, but its still not exactly a fair fight, and as another poster pointed out, the two have very little in common from a technical perspective.