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Ubuntu 9.04 Daily Build Boots In 21.4 Seconds
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jan 14, 2009 05:10 PM
from the spurious-precision-is-2.6-times-better dept.
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..."
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Your Goal: One Second or Less (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 [fairsoftware.net] -- work where geeks are their own boss
Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Interesting)
here:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5429881813.html [linuxdevices.com]
http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (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.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (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 [thinkgos.com]. It was mentioned on slashdot a while ago as well.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ...
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, 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).
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Interesting)
[/clarkson]
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Interesting)
The Top Gear presenters kept comparing it to Concorde. That's how big of a leap forward it was.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (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.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Informative)
The BIOS. The BIOS is pretty much the sole reason PCs take so long to boot.
Regarding Coreboot [fosdem.org] (was: LinuxBIOS):
It doesn't have to be slow.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (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.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of my pet peeves: why can't computers boot in a second or less?
Cripes, I'm all for innovation, but damn, if you're literally counting the half-seconds sucked from your obviously insanely demanding lifestyle waiting for your current OS to boot up, then what the hell are you doing reading Slashdot? ;-)
Hell, while we're on the topic of the damn-near unobtainable, I'd simply settle for true open-document standards, and a pop-up free Internet. Give me that, and I'll go get another cup of coffee while I wait for my OS to boot.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Funny)
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".
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd have to have some sort of auto-login setup, but it'd disingenuous to call your PC booted when it's just sitting at the login screen. On my ubuntu box I'd estimate a good 50% of my boot time is after the login screen before I'm able to do what I wanted to do.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (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.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Funny)
meh, I type my 10+ character password (containing lowercase, uppercase, and numbers) so often that it takes less than 2 seconds.
IDIOT! Now everyone knows your passwd is Ubuntu904
I know your post was supposed to be funny, but while you passed the uppercase, lowercase and number criteria, you failed to pass the 10+ characters criteria mentioned.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, 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".
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Interesting)
Not quite. It's when the login window sleeps. Pretty close. Some people are arguing that this is too narrow sighted, and that we should wait for the gnome login process to sleep before punching the stopclock.
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Your Goal: One Second or Less (Score:5, Funny)
Because Installation of Automatic Updates has completed. Computer will automatically reboot in 5 minutes...
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Oh YEAH? (Score:5, Funny)
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.)
Re:Oh YEAH? (Score:5, Funny)
Well my TABLE LAMP boots in 50ms! Beat THAT!
Not using those new-fangled compact fluorescents, are you sonny?
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Re:Oh YEAH? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Oh YEAH? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, and to whoever modded OP as insightful:
God damn it man, you need to leave your house once in a while.
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Re:Oh YEAH? (Score:5, Funny)
I have to admit, posting from your table lamp is quite impressive. What browser does it run?
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Re:Oh YEAH? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Oh YEAH? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, imagine a chandelier of those!
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I booted up ubuntu just to post (Score:5, Funny)
Booted into Ubuntu 9.04 just to say "first post". Let's just say the ubuntu folks still have some work to do.
Backwards Compatible? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Backwards Compatible? (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.
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Re:Also: does "shred" work with it? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
==
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more appropriate title would be (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to say it but.... (Score:4, Informative)
Comparison times from article (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)!
disappointing... (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.
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
server maintainers care, because people pay them a ton of money to get a guaranteed 99.999% (extreme case, like NY stock exchanges etc.) or more uptime. That's only 5(!) minutes of downtime a year, and if you can boot in 5 seconds (and lets say shutdown in 5 as well), you can reboot 30 times a year for security updates. If you reboot in 30+30 seconds, that's only 5 reboots.
imagine having a scsi raid array which takes 1 minute to initialize. a 20+20 boot+shutdown time would give you barely 3 boots per year. A 5+5 boot+shutdown almost gives you 5 reboots in the same time.
you care for netbooks. The batteries are small, if you waste one minute at boot, and a minute at shutdown, at which the cpu and ssd (or worse: hard disk) are working hard, you lose two minutes of battery time, which translates into 5+ minutes idle or browsing the internet time. Reboot your netbook to quickly send a blog update from the airport a few times, and you've lost half an hour or effective work time.
bottom line: shorter boot (and shutdown) means more _net_ work time available, for both a/c connected and mobile devices.
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What exactly is the definition of boot? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:reformat? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4#Forward_compatibility [wikipedia.org]
Mount ext3 as ext4.
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Re:This booting thing is overrated. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Let me get this of my chest... (Score:5, 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.
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Re:Let me get this of my chest... (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost all of those issues are from third party software.
And it is Canonical's job to test that software and choose which version they are going to ship with. The last release of Ubuntu, all sorts of software broke on my computer that used to work before. This is their fault for choosing to package bad software.
Also, for what it's worth, I've been having the same problem that he is having with Flash when using Gnash and swfdec as well. It seems like ndiswrapper has some issues in the latest Ubuntu that were not a problem in previous releases, beyond the fact that the flash plugin sucks.
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Re:*cries* (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
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