Slashdot Mirror
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 [...]."
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".
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
You mean the suspend for Linux that Actually Worked that I just woke my computer out of ten minutes ago?
And that's with Ubuntu 8.04.
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.
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.
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.
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
You sir get a star. http://haacked.com/images/haacked_com/WindowsLiveWriter/IConfigMapPathIsInaccessibleDueToItsProt_1446B/works-on-my-machine-starburst.png
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
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?
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.
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.
==
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.
The iPhone emphatically does NOT pull off a quick startup. I've just timed mine, it took 43 seconds to go from pushing the power button to having the springboard appear. It does, however, sleep and wake as quickly as any other mac computer.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
...But that requires you to wait for all those zeroes to be written. EXT4 can preallocate without actually doing the write.
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.
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).
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.
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