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Ubuntu 9.04 Daily Build Boots In 21.4 Seconds

Posted by timothy on from the spurious-precision-is-2.6-times-better dept.

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..."

10 of 654 comments (clear)

  1. Your Goal: One Second or Less by alain94040 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by CannonballHead · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think there's more to it than that, though, too. For example, you'd have to completely bypass all checking, device discovery, etc., on boot (it takes time to discover drives, PCI/PCI-E/ISA ;) /USB device. Yeah, you could just have that set up in BIOS or something and just use that configuration, but that could be a pain, too.

      Now, if we're talking about post-POST boot-up, I think something could be done there. Even if it was having the option of, oh, 8GB of onboard memory dedicated to having a fast-boot operating system.

      As far as the extremely fast-boot idea goes, though, isn't that sorta what Good OS's partnership of Cloud and GIGABYTE is supposed to be? The GIGABYTE Touch Netbook M912 to be precise. Link here. It was mentioned on slashdot a while ago as well.

    2. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by vux984 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      Hard to say if there's really a point to booting up before the services are running.

      What good is the PC being 'at the desktop' if the search service still hasn't started, the network still hasn't obtained an ip-address, half my tray icons aren't up? and the hard drive is still madly churning to get everything else running, so anything I try and launch is just going to be thrown into the queue and it probably will depend on something that hasn't started up yet anyway.

      Seriously, how much stuff could you really -defer- to after seeing the desktop and have a useful system?

      Remember the average hard drive moves under 50MB/s. Even a fairly modest Ubuntu desktop requires several times that much RAM. If the hard drive started loading data at maximum speed you've got maybe 50MB you can load in that time, and probably far less in actual practice. That means your kernel, drivers, HAL, desktop environment, localization, firewall, network, background, theme, etc has to ALL fit in under 50MB. And you'd need some sort of impossible situation where the cpu could run all the initialization code for all that in parallel, without waiting... nevermind that it almost has to be initialized in sequence due to the layer dependancies.

      If you want instant on PCs, the only real solution is to never turn them off, waking from suspend to RAM is about as good as its going to get for the forseeable future.

    3. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by lindi · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My desktop uses nfs as its root filesystem so it is easy to measure how much data it will need to read on boot by measuring network traffic. A complete reboot with "shutdown -r now" generated only 44 megabytes of traffic (including both read/written data and ethernet overhead) so there is clearly no need to read a GB. The system runs debian gnu/linux 3.0 with linux 2.6.18-4-486.

    4. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by Chabo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The boss of Volkswagen did this after they bought Bugatti. He said "let's build a car that produces 1000bhp and goes 400kph". Then it took years for the engineers to figure out how such a thing might be possible. In the end, they did it, and it's probably the greatest car ever made.

      [/clarkson]

      --
      Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
    5. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by rossz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In the business world that pretty much sums it up. You don't need to know how to do something. However, despite what you say, figuring out what consumers really want and are willing to pay for is damn hard. Companies spend billions trying to answer this question. Most of the results are complete failures. A few ideas make a few people very rich.

      Geeks can be absolutely brilliant in their field. Given the right direction they can come up with the next big thing. However, most geeks spend their time on little pet projects that will never make a dime. The sad part is when the business man comes up with an idea and the geek implements it, the businessman usually doesn't give the geek enough credit, aka $$$.

      The most rare of exceptions is when the geek comes up with an idea that becomes the next big thing.

      --
      -- Will program for bandwidth
    6. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by collinstocks · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I set up an auto-login for my Ubuntu laptop, and then have the session-manager lock the screen immediately after logging on (before the panel or nautilus have even loaded, so while the desktop is still unusable). This way, after pressing the power button, I don't have to interact with my computer at all until immediately before I want to use it (i.e. to type my password in order to unlock the screen).

      Unfortunately, just putting `gnome-screensaver-command -l` into the session manager won't work because it doesn't seem to load immediately. Instead, I made it run a script that executes that command in between calls to `sleep 1` six or eight times. It works for me.

    7. Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less by Chabo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Right. At least one car (the SSC Ultimate Aero) has beaten the Bugatti's speed record for a production car, but the Bugatti is simply an engineering marvel. Most "really fast" cars are designed to hit their speed limit a few times, and F1 cars are designed to do a couple races, but the Veyron is designed to last 20 or 30 years of road driving.

      The Top Gear presenters kept comparing it to Concorde. That's how big of a leap forward it was.

      --
      Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
  2. disappointing... by sofar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:*cries* by FrankSchwab · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Okay, you're right; resuming from power savings modes works perfectly in Vista.

    Now, run a test for me. Attach a secondary monitor, and place it to the LEFT of your laptop. Configure everything to work well. Reboot, and notice everything is still good. Open a few applications, move them to the secondary monitor, then close them. Something mainstream, like Outlook, will do.

    Now, suspend your laptop. Undock it, and walk to a conference room. Wake it up. Note that many applications now open on the (non-existent) second monitor. Including mainstream applications from major software companies, as an example Outlook.

    Suspend it. Take it back in and dock it. Wake it. Notice that Vista now believes that your secondary monitor is on the RIGHT of your laptop.

    Heaven help you if you connected your laptop to the conference room projector when you were there.

    Yep, Vista works exceptionally well for all common usage scenarios with suspend/hibernate.

    That's why I'm interested in boot times. /frank

    --
    And the worms ate into his brain.