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..."

Comments

Your Goal: One Second or Less

[alain94040]

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

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[CannonballHead]

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.

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[Cyberllama]

So in order to be a "visionary", I merely have to decide what consumers might want (not that hard being one yourself), and then ask people smarter than yourself to make it happen with no actual technical insight on how to make it happen yourself?

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[vux984]

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.

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[Kent Recal]

Sorry to break it for you but boot time is measured from the push of the power button to a usable desktop.
You may enjoy your 26 seconds of pretending that "this is not really happening" - most other people don't.

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[lindi]

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.

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[Chabo]

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]

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[rossz]

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.

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[Dr. Spork]

You may enjoy your 26 seconds of pretending that "this is not really happening" - most other people don't.

Why yes, I do enjoy that very much. I call it "sex".

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[Bryan Ischo]

Why does it take so long to discover those drives and other devices? Why does a CD-ROM drive take hundreds of milliseconds to be recognized during a POST? These things should happen basically instantly at modern hardware speeds, and yet they don't.

It reminds me of NFS timeouts. Years ago when I worked in an environment where everyone NFS mounted a shared filesystem, there would occasionally be outages on the server or in the network. 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. Even at that time, we were running 10 MBit or maybe 100 MBit network connections; if the remote system is going to respond, it's going to happen at MOST after a few second delay. Waiting for minutes just seems dumb.

The same sort of thing happens alot with web browsers too that wait far too long for servers to time out. If the server doesn't respond in 10 seconds, it's not going to respond. Ever. There's no reason to wait 30 seconds or longer to timeout an HTTP connection ...

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[Malevolyn]

Oh yeah? Well I optimized my sex down to 23 seconds. Top THAT!

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[hailukah]

All this high technology, what ever happened to doing things by hand?

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[collinstocks]

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.

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[Chabo]

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.

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[Eil]

You know how everyone wanted a Linux-based operating system that "just worked" on a wide variety of hardware with drivers for everything? And didn't throw a shit-fit if you moved the hard disk to a completely different machine and tried to boot it up?

That's why Linux takes so long to boot these days. You can have very good hardware compatibility or you can have very good boot speed. You can't have both. (Well, until someone invents persistent RAM.)

Why does it take so long to discover those drives and other devices? Why does a CD-ROM drive take hundreds of milliseconds to be recognized during a POST? These things should happen basically instantly at modern hardware speeds, and yet they don't.

The CD-ROM does respond to the BIOS very quickly. What takes forever is the BIOS checking each controller, chain, and bus location for a device. Waiting for those probes to time out is what takes so long. This isn't just the BIOS either, it's the Linux kernel too and any OS that might want to speak to whatever hardware might happen to be there.

. Even at that time, we were running 10 MBit or maybe 100 MBit network connections; if the remote system is going to respond, it's going to happen at MOST after a few second delay. Waiting for minutes just seems dumb.

Seems dumb to you, the user. Didn't seem dumb to the programmers who wrote NFS and whatever application you were using. Why? NFS is 1) a block device, and 2) largely a hack. The way UNIX was designed, block devices just don't disappear from the system. Just like wheels (ideally) don't go flying off your car while you're driving down the road. But when NFS, a block device can suddenly go unavailable and as far as the OS is concerned, that's just really really bad for all sorts of reasons. The programmers figured that in order to make the system as robust as possible, they'd extend the timeout as long as tolerable to reduce the chances of data loss and corruption as much as possible. It's conceivable that a large number of problems could be resolved in a matter minutes (say, somebody tripped over the power cord for the network switch), thus preventing the loss of what could be very valuable data.

The same sort of thing happens alot with web browsers too that wait far too long for servers to time out. If the server doesn't respond in 10 seconds, it's not going to respond. Ever. There's no reason to wait 30 seconds or longer to timeout an HTTP connection ...

You click a mouse button. This initiates a request which, after all of the appropriate nameservers have been consulted, hops from your machine over dozens of routers, switches, and cables owned by different countries and corporations. It travels thousands of miles away to some place you can't even pronounce. Once there, the server recognises the request and acts on it, sending you back a mix of static content, images, and database content several orders of magnitude greater in size than your original request. The content then travels back to you another few thousand miles, perhaps via a different path until it eventually reaches your machine where it is processed and displayed in a mostly-legible fashion. And you have the gall to complain that sometimes it takes longer than 10 seconds for all of this to happen?

Good. Fucking. Grief.

I'm continually amazed that it works at all and I'm a sysadmin at a web hosting company. Almost every day I run across a site I want to visit that takes longer than 10 seconds to respond in full. There are lots of very good reasons that a website might take between 10-30 seconds to load in your browser. The authors of the HTTP protocol, web server software, and web browsers having a personal grudge against you sure isn't one of them.

Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less

[camperdave]

All I see is **********. Maybe someone else could post their password so we can check it.

I booted up ubuntu just to post

[colin_n]

Booted into Ubuntu 9.04 just to say "first post". Let's just say the ubuntu folks still have some work to do.

Re:Oh YEAH?

[natebarney]

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

more appropriate title would be

[ani23]

boots 3.1 seconds faster with ext4 over ext3

Re:Oh YEAH?

[Xtense]

Well there you go, ruin all my fun with your silly math thingamabob. Thanks a lot!

Oh, and to whoever modded OP as insightful:
God damn it man, you need to leave your house once in a while.

Comparison times from article

[mgkimsal2]

* 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)!

disappointing...

[sofar]

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.

Re:Backwards Compatible?

[linuxkrn]

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.

Re:Oh YEAH?

[Cthefuture]

I have to admit, posting from your table lamp is quite impressive. What browser does it run?

Re:Oh YEAH?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lighthouse 1.8

I'd like to see Navigator not crash on the rocks without Lighthouse. The Safari would never happen. The Explorer would stay at home.

Re:Oh YEAH?

[Linker3000]

Wow, imagine a chandelier of those!

Re:*cries*

[FrankSchwab]

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