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Operating Systems Software Linux

How To Speed Up Linux Booting 301

Posted by kdawson from the up-and-running dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A common complaint about Linux is the amount of time the operating system takes to start. Like Linux itself, there are plenty of options and lots of flexibility for boot-time optimization. From dependency-based solutions like initng to event-based solutions like upstart, there's an optimization solution that should fit your needs. Using the bootchart package, you can dig in further to understand where your system is spending its boot time to optimize even more."
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How To Speed Up Linux Booting More

How To Speed Up Linux Booting

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  • -1st post (Score:5, Funny)

    by Looce ( 1062620 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @12:39PM (#18471685) Journal
    My Linux setup is so optimised that this first post is actually made before opening Firefox and typing slashdot.org.

    Ha!

    • Re:-1st post (Score:4, Funny)

      by alanwj ( 242317 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @02:26PM (#18472595)

      and typing slashdot.org
      Slashdot isn't your home page?

      • Re:-1st post (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Looce ( 1062620 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @02:55PM (#18472809) Journal
        Not really. Not even mozilla.org either. That would be about:blank.

        I don't need to download a page every time I start my browser, render it and slow it down, then replace it immediately with another page I want to visit. That's another part of system optimisation, and it avoids unnecessary strain on slashdot/mozilla/other servers, too.
        • Agreed - about:blank saves lots of time when opening pages, especially since my laptop is sometimes plugged into a work LAN or VPN where it needs a proxy and sometimes into the Internet where it doesn't, and this not only avoids waiting for complex pages to load, but avoids getting stuck by incorrect proxy settings.

          The Personal Bookmarks Toolbar makes Slashdot one mouse click away.

    • But I had to wait too long for the damn thing to boot, so I missed the opportunity. I wish there was information somewhere that could help me speed that process up.

  • Boot time not an issue. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AmIAnAi ( 975049 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @12:40PM (#18471695)
    I thought one of the arguments for linux was that you didn't need to reboot - like you do with Windows. So the boot time should not matter :-)

    • Re:Boot time not an issue. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nbannerman ( 974715 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @12:47PM (#18471743)
      I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason. The home user isn't going to be persuaded by Linux if he/she has to wait a long time to actually get a computer into a usable state*.

      To be fair, my Windows box boots pretty quick; I think the time between power on and desktop is somewhere in the region of 50 seconds. The method of loading the core services - desktop - additional services at least gives the impression of speed, even through the disk continues to thrash for another 45 seconds as applications load in the background.

      * Jokes about Windows never being usable even after booting can be inserted here as required! ;)

      • Re:Boot time not an issue. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bertNO@SPAMslashdot.firenzee.com> on Saturday March 24, 2007 @01:28PM (#18472093) Homepage
        But as you said, for the first few minutes after boot, windows is thrashing the disk and running slower... Sometimes it even does ridiculous things, like closing the start menu while your trying to select something from it, or ignoring some mouse clicks.
        You could make linux start in the same way, modify the init scripts to start XDM first, and everything else later, in which case you'd have the same appearance of fast booting.

      • I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason.

        I care about saving electricity as much as the next guy (fuel efficient car, low-power lighting, recycling, etc.), but I draw the line with my computers. One of my linux boxes is a firewall, so that's up all the time. Another is my old desktop that has some extra drives in it which also I use to play with remote X, LDAP, all that other stuff. And my desktop box is always o

      • Re:Boot time not an issue. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by cmacb ( 547347 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @02:06PM (#18472435) Homepage Journal

        To be fair, my Windows box boots pretty quick; I think the time between power on and desktop is somewhere in the region of 50 seconds.


        The only reason you can say that 50 seconds seems pretty quick is that most of us remember when several minutes was he norm. The interesting thing is that as feature creep in all operating systems has continued (you can't have glass windows in one OS without users of all other OSs feel the "need" for it too after all) has kept boot time longer than we would like, even though hardware speeds have continued to increase by orders of magnitude.

        Can you imagine how long an XP boot (or Ubuntu for that mater) would take on an old 386 system with a sluggish hard drive and not a lot of memory (if such a thing were even possible)? Hours I would guess, and you would shake your head wondering if your hard drives MTBF would get you through the process.

        In the future will it take four or eight processors in a box to keep the lag down to 50 seconds? Should we take any delight in the fact that Windows boot will be sped up again only by special code to pre-load parts of the OS into flash ram before shutdown? I don't. I'd much prefer to see an almost-instant-on OS that didn't depend on special hardware tricks but rather because the architects actually designed the bloody thing for a change. Aint gonna happen though. If there are still any really smart people working at MS I'm sure they are working on the next great Google/Sony/IBM/Oracle killer or something. Faster boots would benefit ALL Windows users, not just MS only shops. We can't have that now can we?

        It's a good sign when an OS rarely needs to be booted, which is at least the case with Linux and OS X (can't speak for Vista). I leave my machines running all the time, even my desktop has laptop innards, so they go into a low power state when not used for a while. What I do to clean up any cruft that has built p running poorly behaved applications is to reboot when I am done using the computer for a while. That way I don't have to sit around and wait for the process to complete. the machine reboots, sits there for thirty minutes and then goes to sleep. It's ready to go and "freshly" booted the next time I need it. Of course if you like to keep a lot of memory hogs autoloaded and running in the background this system may not work so well.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by neongrau ( 1032968 )
          i think all we need is an near 100% reliable "suspend-to-some-super-fast-non-volatile-ram"

          when we have that a reboot will be more like compiling the current state.
          as long as you don't change any configration no reboot should be necessary at all.
          just suspend and restore all the time.

           
        • The only reason you can say that 50 seconds seems pretty quick is that most of us remember when several minutes was he norm.

          And some of us remember when it was about 5 seconds.

          Of course, that was a TRS-80. :)

      • I guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason.

        I leave my Linux box at work on so that I don't have to reopen windows and whatnot every morning. That is my reason, but I'm also upset that my work did not buy me a Mac like I have at home. It goes to sleep, and only uses a few watts of power and takes seconds to wake up.

        My point is that in 2007, computers should be viewed as appliances, and that power management should b

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )
        I think that it's more worthwhile to spend time making Linux suspend and hibernate correctly. My PowerBook, for example, hasn't been booted or rebooted in quite a few months. For a desktop user boot time is important, but hitting a button and being ready to go, as should happen when you wake from sleep, is even better. I'm amused that Windows users are happy with their 15 second wake-from-sleep times. My PowerBook (and now MacBook) are ready to go in about a second or two. I think Linux on laptops and

      • Boot to desktop (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DrYak ( 748999 )

        To be fair, my Windows box boots pretty quick; I think the time between power on and desktop

        The trick is just right there. It's the time until desktop shows up. Not until the system is usable.
        Windows XP (and I think Vista too, but the friend that was supposed to gime her unused Vista CD hasn't yet) tries to show desktop as soon as possible, even if all services didn't finish booting.

        My machine isn't brand new. I mean at all. It's an old Pentium III Tualatin with 440BX chipset and 1GB SDR 133.

        On linux (opens

      • Re:Boot time not an issue. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by TheNetAvenger ( 624455 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @07:37PM (#18474775)
        guess the point is that we *should* be switching our machines off whenever possible as opposed to leaving them running for no reason. The home user isn't going to be persuaded by Linux if he/she has to wait a long time to actually get a computer into a usable state*.


        Yes, but rebooting should not be the option people are using. Go the power management route and do things like enter low power mode, or do a full suspend to disk (hibernate).

        Rebooting really should not the solution to using less power, especially with the Power management concepts can be automated based on idle usage, turn themselves back on to run tasks and back off.

        I got into this habit from carrying a couple of laptops full time, and it is something I carry over to my personal desktops as well.

        People need to just exchange Off with Hibernate in their minds. Even with Windows, which doesn't have bad boot times, it is just easier to tell the system your power button is the hibernate button, and hit it and go on my way. Then turning on the computer is a few seconds and I don't have to worry about what I left running ever. Especially with someone like me that has tons of crap running all the time, including several VMs which I don't have to individually suspend to disk if I were to shut down the computer everytime.

        And thank god OSX finally added a true hibernate in 10.4 on their notebooks, cause not having it about drove me flipping insane.

        So now that 99% of all OSes have ok power management, rebooting should be a thing of core updates only.

        PS
        The boot times on Linux are really not bad in a default install on most distributions. And people shouldn't take this article as evidence that Linux is slow or sucks at boot times.

        However, I do applaud the efforts to improve boot times, and wish there was a bit more generic optimization like people from the Windows world are use to.

        Vista for example monitors the last 5 boot times, and will continually adjust disk layout and process order, etc to continue to speed up boot times. There is no reason all OSes couldn't add a generic form of optimization like this.

    • Re:Boot time not an issue. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @12:49PM (#18471769) Homepage Journal
      Indeed. The boot time of a system you boot once a year is rather irrelevant.
      Laptop, you say? Hibernate, don't boot!

      What's more interesting is to reduce the login time and start-up time for applications. prelink is your best friend here. Make sure that all your apps are compiled for position independent code (PIC), and prelink them. Lots of time saved, at the expense of larger binaries.

      Regards,
      --
      *Art

      • Re:Boot time not an issue. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Micah ( 278 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @01:06PM (#18471911) Homepage Journal
        In my Kubuntu Feisty install, Hibernate takes about as long as shutting down and starting it back up about as long as a normal start.

        Of course, all the apps are still there so that helps. But it's not nearly as efficient as, say, a Mac where you can close the lid any time, open it back up again and have it right there in 2 seconds.
        • Well I haven't used a Mac, so I am in a bit of ignorance here - but isn't that sleep or suspend? Which Windows has too (and I would have to imagine Linux does as well). Now I am regretting that I have never used Linux on a notebook (I have it on desktops; low end ones without power management features), but my notebooks are always Windows. The sleep mode is pretty darn quick as long as you are not going to be without power for like 48 hours in which case sleep will still draw the battery down a lot in that
        • You're suspending to disk, which is why it takes so long. Try suspending to ram, which is what Macs do.

          • Re:Boot time not an issue. (Score:5, Informative)

            by Columcille ( 88542 ) * on Saturday March 24, 2007 @01:35PM (#18472165)
            suspend to disk = hibernate, suspend to ram = sleep. Sleep uses the battery, hibernate doesn't. Granted sleep mode doesn't use much, but it isn't altogether negligible. If you don't want to use any power while moving around, hibernate is the way to go. Perhaps that's his scenario.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by ThisNukes4u ( 752508 ) *
              Yes, but he was comparing linux's performance to how quick OS X works just by opening the lid, which is directly comparable to sleep, not hibernate.
            • Yeah, cause writing all those gigs of data to disk is free, right? Right?

              So you want the computer to sleep/hibernate for an hour, which is cheaper? Well, don't ask me as i haven't done any calculations on it, but I'm sure you haven't either.
    • Unless you are running a server or something, there's no reason to leave your computer on when you aren't using it. It just wastes power.

      • "Unless you are running a server or something, there's no reason to leave your computer on when you aren't using it. It just wastes power."

        My computer is my central heating system, you ignorant clod!"

        Think about it - during the heating season, if you use electric resistance heating, you can run your computer "for free" 24 hours a day - the heat it generates will be the same as the heat from that many watts going through your baseboards, so its a wash. Same thing with incandescent lighting.

        Of course

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Unless you are running a server or something, there's no reason to leave your computer on when you aren't using it. It just wastes power.

        Of course, that little "or something" includes things like nightly backups (you do take backups, don't you?), defragmentations, log rotations and archival, AV definition updates, patch downloading and other things you don't want to be interrupted with during the day.

        Also, a system that's freshly started will be slower, both because it won't have the unused part of memory f

  • Fixed in Gentoo (Score:5, Informative)

    by Wonko the Sane ( 25252 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @12:41PM (#18471711) Journal
    in /etc/conf.d/rc:

    rc_parallel_startup="yes"

    (actually that should be in caps, but the lameness filter doesn't like it)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ant P. ( 974313 )
      I used to use that, but less common initscripts like Folding@Home don't like it - sometimes things will just fail to start randomly on boot.

  • Customize the Bootscript, Trim the Fat (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Old Duck ( 957936 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @12:48PM (#18471765) Homepage

    Most bootscripts are very generic in that they will try to load all sorts of RAID drivers, various services that are not needed, special fonts, etc.. I've gone in on my computers and wrote a very simple, quick, and to-the-point bootscript (easy to do with a little BASH knowledge), and my system boots up remarkedly fast. Granted, my bootscript isn't very portable, but one of the benefits of Linux is the ability to customize it.

    Another trick is to prelink files and let KDE (if that is what you use) know about it. Even the startkde script can be long and drawn out, so trimming the fat and only including what's needed on your system can make a big difference. I've shaved over 13 seconds off a boot sequence by writing a minimum bootscript for my hardware, and that was using a relatively fast distro to start with.

    -Mike

  • Back when I was starting out with Linux, this used to annoy me and was a factor to consider when weighing up Linux vs Windows.

    Eventually, as I became more proficient in Linux, the longer boot time became less and less of a factor as Windows became less useful for me compared to Linux.

  • The "bootchart" tool looks promising. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @12:52PM (#18471803) Homepage

    The "bootchart" tool mentioned in the article looks promising. But it's mostly unlabeled bars. Until they figure out how to correctly identify all the processes running during boot, it's not too helpful.

    The CPU utilization during booting is much higher than I would have expected. That's interesting, and unexpected. For most of the first ten seconds of post-kernel startup, the system is CPU bound, while the disk is idle more than half the time. Where is all that CPU effort going?

    • It's been a while since I analyzed the boot process of one of my Linux systems, but this is what I recall noticing:

      Immediately after kernel startup, there is a lot of hardware probing and configuration going on. On older systems, setting up ISA pnp cards can take quite a while. Along with that, udev uses a lot of cpu time getting things going. Dbus was also one of the slower services to start. Also, if your init scripts are really borked, you can waste several seconds waiting for a dhcp response.

      Also, the b

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Animats ( 122034 )

        Ah. The charts on the real web site are much more useful.

        Looks like "usb-agent" is using way too much CPU time. The Linux hot-plugging system seems to consume excessive resources. Big jobs like file system recovery and GUI startup aren't the bottleneck. It's probably going to turn out that something simple like parsing the file of hot-pluggable devices and drivers is inefficient.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by slamb ( 119285 ) *
          Keep in mind when looking at the images on bootchart's webpage that they're two years old. The best boot chart for your system is one you've made yourself. The project's about the tool to make charts, not the sample results.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by slamb ( 119285 ) *

      The "bootchart" tool mentioned in the article looks promising. But it's mostly unlabeled bars. Until they figure out how to correctly identify all the processes running during boot, it's not too helpful.

      As another poster said, the article's image was cropped. bootchart generates one line per process, and it tells you what the process is. It's a really nice tool. It's more aimed at distribution developers than end users, of course - silly to recommend to people that they change their whole system's init sy

    • I have no idea where they found that version of bootchart, but there's a .deb that will generate those .pngs and save them in /var/log/. It's a good start at diagnosing how to make things go faster, but once the low hanging fruit (like 4 second system pauses) are gone it's not as informative. You'll have to start examining why a process is IO bound or CPU bound, and whether it makes sense. I think Dave Jones had a journal article about stupid things user programs do like stat the same file 400 times, once p

  • How to Pimp Out Linux Booting (Score:3, Informative)

    by rwa2 ( 4391 ) * on Saturday March 24, 2007 @12:56PM (#18471841) Homepage Journal
    Fascinating article, but while searching through aptitude for some of those alternative init engines, I came across bootsplash instead and I couldn't resist!

    http://www.bootsplash.org/ [bootsplash.org]

    Uh, yeah, I guess I could make good use of bootchart from the article too... mmm... more eye candy.... and you can keep looking at / admiring your stats / comparing with you friends' stats long after after you've booted up anyway!

    Seriously, real Linux servers don't reboot :P

    (burned by playing with runit some time ago)

  • Popular FUD. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by twitter ( 104583 )

    A common complaint about Linux is the amount of time the operating system takes to start.

    Actually, it's a common insult and FUD. Understanding your boot process is nice and all, but your distribution already does this and has come to reasonable compromises. If you want to tweak with it, more power to you but you won't really save much. With proper power management you don't have to boot at all. For instance, the laptop I'm using says:

    12:47:33 up 65 days, 15:12, 21 users, load average: 1.20, 1.50,

    • I was hoping someone would do this. I don't have a Linux laptop yet. The one I use is from work where they insist on Windows XP. If I could get it to perform properly using sleep mode I'd be rather happy. Moving back and forth from VPN to wired connection just upsets XP beyond my ability to sort it out.

      My Linux boxes (and some Solaris boxes, no laptops) all manage to have ridiculous uptimes. Well, they did till the PHB said to reboot everything after DST patching regardless of requirement. We had a FC4 and

    • Re:Popular FUD. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nicopa ( 87617 ) <nico.lichtmaier@gma i l . com> on Saturday March 24, 2007 @01:13PM (#18471977)
      The world doesn't end just near your nose. You may have a laptop and you may be happy with "hibernating" it, but many of us need to power off PCs. An office PC I power on every day, my home's PC I power on and off when I get and leave home.

      And it's your comment the one that is insulting. You insult lots of experienced Linux users who do care about their machines booting several times slower than an XP pc.

      And why is that? Because Linux boots up with a slow and serialized process, in which the whole system (with hyperthreading, gigs of ram, dual core, etc.) sits idel waiting for a single stupid syslog daemon to start, or worse: waiting for a DHCP client to get an IP address!

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by metamatic ( 202216 )
        If your PC is so old that it doesn't have a hibernate option, you're in a minority. Most systems have been Energy Star compliant for years.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by izomiac ( 815208 )
          AFAIK hibernate is entirely done in the OS. I.e. instead of booting normally it partially boots then retrieves the contents of RAM from disk. Sleep requires that hardware is put in a low power state and such. Personal example: my Mom's computer came preinstalled with Windows 98, so obviously it shouldn't have any hardware support for hibernation, but it still manages to hibernate with Windows XP just fine.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by zsau ( 266209 )
          How about for those plenty of us for whom hibernate under GNU/Linux simply doesn't work? On my laptop it works about one in three times depending on the phase of the moon; on my desktop it never works. (This is irritating, because there's some program—probably soundcard driver—on my desktop which is buggy and causes the computer to hang for five minutes or until I press Ctrl-C during boot. I'd kill to get around that.)

      • You insult lots of experienced Linux users who do care about their machines booting several times slower than an XP pc.

        That's an insult to everyone's intelligence. There is no such machine, unless you have serious hardware problems and the present article is the "more power to you" that I mentioned. Many live CDs boot faster than XP and most installed distributions boot faster than that.

        You may have a laptop and you may be happy with "hibernating" it, but many of us need to power off PCs. An office

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jb.hl.com ( 782137 )
          That's an insult to everyone's intelligence. There is no such machine, unless you have serious hardware problems and the present article is the "more power to you" that I mentioned.

          Anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. On my (old; I ditched it this morning for a Mac...that feeling, twitter, is called cognitive dissonance) PC, XP booted in about 20-25 seconds whereas Ubuntu took about 30-40 seconds. I'm not even going to start on the prepostorous LiveCD thing...how could a full Linux/GNOME desktop booting f

    • Re:Popular FUD. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Silver Sloth ( 770927 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @01:18PM (#18472009)

      12:47:33 up 65 days, 15:12, 21 users, load average: 1.20, 1.50, 1.61
      21 users on a laptop? Doesn't it get a bit crowded around the keyboard?

      • 21 users on a laptop? Doesn't it get a bit crowded around the keyboard?

        I use a lot of Gnome terminals.

        I log into it myself from other machines from time to time but dhcp networking makes sharing it with other people impractical.

      • Lots of system processes run as different users...on Debian, anyway.

    • Re:Popular FUD. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Idaho ( 12907 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @02:01PM (#18472389)

      Actually, it's a common insult and FUD. Understanding your boot process is nice and all, but your distribution already does this and has come to reasonable compromises.


      Denying the problem doesn't make it go away, really. All the hibernation and sleep modes in the world don't change the fact that Linux boot times are much longer than, say, Windows XP's.

      I'm sorry, but I run both Windows and Linux on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop, and booting Linux takes much, much longer. We're talking 2-3x longer, in fact.

      If you want to tweak with it, more power to you but you won't really save much. With proper power management you don't have to boot at all. For instance, the laptop I'm using says:


      Yeah, that's nice and all, assuming the power management actually works correctly.

      Which, for many laptops, it doesn't. For instance, some time ago I finally managed to get hibernation mode to work (after a lot of fiddling), but it was still experimental at the time (ca. half a year ago) and would crash on resume sometimes. Not good when you have some important applications still running.

      Now I'm running a different distribution (FC5) and it hangs after resuming from "normal" sleep mode (which is activated when I close the lid).

      So yes, boot time is quite relevant for me, thank you very much, and saying this is FUD is ... well... uninformed, at best.

      People who complain about long gnu/linux boot times have either not learned how to use their much better systems yet or are FUDing astroturfers.


      Or perhaps they are people who get tired of having to spend 2 weekends to get some stupid features, such as sleep mode and hibernation, to work correctly. Which then promptly breaks, of course, on the next kernel upgrade (which, in my case, was needed to get wireless to work).

      This is also why I won't bother with trying to speed up the boot-time of my laptop, I'm waiting for some decent distro which does it for me!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by izomiac ( 815208 )
      How about duel boot laptops? After all, Linux's hardware support for laptops isn't that great, and many people still have things they need (or prefer) to do in Windows or some other OS. Hibernation doesn't remount partitions, so guess what happens if you hibernate, boot another OS, edit a file, then resume?

      If boot time didn't matter then people wouldn't complain about it. You could hibernate all the time, but hibernation isn't perfect (or safe in all situations), and some people just like to start wit

  • How about 1.1 seconds to the bash shell? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dattaway ( 3088 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @01:00PM (#18471879) Homepage Journal
    If it can be done on a 200MHz ARM9 processor in just over a second, anyone else can do it:

    http://www.embeddedarm.com/epc/ts7400-spec-h.htm [embeddedarm.com]

    • Re:How about 1.1 seconds to the bash shell? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 644bd346996 ( 1012333 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @01:27PM (#18472091)
      That ARM board stores the entire operating system in flash. It uses busybox and pretty much nothing else, to get a shell up that fast. It doesn't have to wait for any hard drives or peripherals to initalize. LinuxBIOS can do similar things, but only on some machines. TFA is all about getting services to start quickly. Turning off everything is not an acceptable alternative.

  • Ubuntu already uses Upstart (Score:5, Informative)

    by wile_e_wonka ( 934864 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @01:10PM (#18471937)
    When I went out to take advantage of the article's suggestions, I found that, according to this thread in the Ubuntu Forums [ubuntuforums.org] that Ubuntu 6.10 already uses Upstart.

    I did used the "profile" command in my bootup once, after reading about it in another article recently. So I guess my Ubuntu is booting about as fast as it can (unless I have useless processes starting up. I'm still trying to figure that out--I'm a noobie).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by makomk ( 752139 )
      Ubuntu does already use Upstart, but it's basically set up to imitate the aging traditional init system, so I doubt you'll get much of a speed up.
  • OS X went to launchd [apple.com] which is an init.d, cron, inetd, etc replacement. I'd like to see how launchd compares to upstart.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by spoonist ( 32012 )
      Replying to my own post? Nice. I found this comparison [netsplit.com] between upstart and launchd. Long story short, launchd isn't event driven.
    • The original problem with launchd - from a Linux perspective - was the licensing. Now that Apple has changed the license for it, is anyone working on bringing it to Linux or the BSDs?

      Having been both a Linux user and now a Mac head (and having used a Mac prior to launchd's advent), I think the other *nixes should at least be looking at it because it sure seems like a significant improvement boot-wise. But I suppose purists will just say "not GPL, no thank you", and then go back to complaining how Linux on t

  • Lots of always-on selfishness (Score:3, Interesting)

    by linvir ( 970218 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @02:06PM (#18472439)

    Anybody else appalled by the amount of people saying "just don't turn it off"?. I know I am. It's shocking for various reasons:

    1. It's an unnecessary, unethical waste of energy.
    2. It's an unnecessary security risk to leave so much of your sensitive data connected to the internet completely unattended.
    3. If you do get compromised, there is then the ethical issue of the amount of spam/DDoS your box can be used for by the time you realise what has happened.
    4. It's a poor solution to the problem of long boot times. A better solution would be to man up and learn some fucking patience.
    5. It uses up your machine's useful lifespan much more quickly at no significant gain to you.
    6. It's yet another electrical appliance always on and always ready to set off your smoke alarm or even start an electrical fire.

    If you leave your computer on 24/7 just for convenience, then perhaps you ought to consider the possibility that you are a spoilt rich selfish pussy and not the infallible sysadmin you undoubtedly believe yourself to be.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Aliencow ( 653119 )
      1. It's an unnecessary, unethical waste of energy.
      I pay for my hydroelectricity thank you very much. I use CFLs and wash my clothes with cold water.

      2. It's an unnecessary security risk to leave so much of your sensitive data connected to the internet completely unattended.

      Oh yeah, if my machine is easily hackable, leaving it on 12 hours a day instead of 24 will make a huge difference.

      3. If you do get compromised, there is then the ethical issue of the amount o

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Khaed ( 544779 )
      It's an unnecessary, unethical waste of energy.

      So what? With my monitor turned off, my desktop uses a lot less energy. I'm not running a giant 500w power supply though. It's no worse than leaving a few lights on. Also, these are Linux boxes were're talking about -- they're hardly sitting around idle. (Mine is generally running MythTV, downloading one thing or another, etc.)

      I like having it do things that I don't want to sit there and wait on.

      I don't think security is such a big issue it deserves two points

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jeorgen ( 84395 )

      It's an unnecessary, unethical waste of energy.

      So, raise the price of (fossil fuel) energy. Let individuals make their own decisions. Besides, hard disks last longer if in continuous operation, it is the spinning up below working temperature that kills them. You have to account for the energy needed to make a new hard disk (and other environmental load from making it and dispensing with the old one).

      It uses up your machine's useful lifespan much more quickly at no significant gain to you.

      No keeping it on

    • Fair enough, but it isn't all one way. Concerning #5 ("It uses up your machine's useful lifespan much more quickly at no significant gain to you."), shutting down and booting up may shorten lifespan faster than keeping it on - there is much more stress during those two operations than constant idle for several hours. Also, keeping your parts at a constant temperature may be better in some cases than cooling them down (when off) and re-heating them.

      But I admit that there are plenty of arguments the other
  • I am running Kubuntu 6.10, and I have to say that I have been pleasantly surprised with Upstart, for the most part. It really is much quicker than the older boot sequences, as well as Windows XP, in my personal tests. I still have a couple qualms, however.

    The lack of a method to switch back to the traditional, detailed boot sequence is annoying. Editing /boot/grub/menu.lst and commenting out "quiet splash" takes care of it, but I don't always want to perform a status check when booting. This is a really simple thing to provide accomodation for, and I may just be unaware of a more simple solution that is already in place. If anyone knows of one, please enlighten me.

    The other problem comes as a result of the first. There is, with no option to switch to a detailed boot sequence, also no way to skip network detection. I am used to just issuing 'Ctrl+C' to skip it, and so it is quite frustrating sometimes. If you aren't connected to a network, or if you connect only after you have brought the system up, you are stuck waiting however long the default timeout is, unless you, again, perform a manual edit. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if arguments could be passed by default at boot-time, but as far as I know they cannot.

    Once again, if anyone knows of solutions to these issues that I am ignorant of, I'd be grateful to hear them. Other than what I have related, though, K/X/Ubuntu 6.10 boots very quickly, and I am quite happy with it.

  • No it isn't. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by caluml ( 551744 ) <[gro.mulac.erehseogmaps] [ta] [todhsals]> on Saturday March 24, 2007 @02:15PM (#18472511) Homepage
    A common complaint about Linux is the amount of time the operating system takes to start.

    No it isn't. Of all the things I've heard people complaining about Linux about, the start up time isn't one of them.
  • I know this is off-thread, but is there anyway to speed up Windows booting? At least with Linux you can tune and serialize or parallelize the boot process for speed. Is there anyway to do this with Windows? The 35 processes that launch out of my system tray just don't want play nice together on boot :)

    Sorry for the offtopic, but this is a sincere post.
    • > I know this is off-thread, but is there anyway to speed up Windows booting?

      Reinstalling helps for a while, but downgrading to older version of Windows seems to be the only solution. (You have to reinstall the older version also once in a while or it doesn't help either.)
    • Windows starts up a bunch of different processes and applications at and after boot time, and it keeps hiding them in more different places every new OS version. So you'll have to hunt them all down. The easy one is your Startup folder (especially if your machine is set up by a Corporate IT Droid Department). See what apps you do and don't need, and make yourself a Don't Start folder to drag the ones you don't usually need into. Then go find the other various startup scripts, directories, etc. (i.e. RTF
    • What you can do is remove startup stuff. I used to do this with start->run->msconfig, but I'm told Vista has a better way of doing it.

      What you can't do is make it take less time with the bouncing "progress bar" between power on and actually starting up the GUI (and giving you the login page if you actually login). This can go very quickly, but it seems one of the inevitable little things about Windows that deteriorates -- after a few months, for whatever reason (I'm guessing the Registry), this step w

  • Linux boot time? How about hardware startup! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ed Random ( 27877 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @02:33PM (#18472653) Homepage Journal
    All in all, playing with parallelized OS startup is very nice but the real problem lies elsewhere...

    In my experience (data center, 350+ Intel-based servers, Linux + Windows plus a bunch of SPARC Solaris boxes), the OS boot time is negligible compared to the time needed for hardware initialization:

    - BIOS startup
    - Memory check
    - Remote Console init (DRAC/XSCF etc.)
    - RAID Controller(s) init, disk spinup
    - RAID Consistency Check, volume initialization
    - Start Boot Sequence

    Especially the disk subsystems cause large delays - most time is spent waiting for the GRUB screen.

    Parallelizing the hardware initialization is where we could make some significant progress.
    • Not even that. Aside from doubts as to whether you can actually parallize the hardware initialization, there's the fact that most of these are just stupidly written -- Grub included. Lilo had the right idea -- it can be configured to automatically boot, with no delay, unless you're holding alt. I want everything up to and including Grub to function that way. I honestly don't care about the memory check, and most of these things are disabled on my box, but many controllers will take over the whole screen to

  • Boot times don't bother me (Score:5, Funny)

    by DoctorPepper ( 92269 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @02:48PM (#18472761)
    Because I only reboot my computers when I have to, like when I get an update to the kernel. The rest of the time, they just waste electricity and CPU cycles, and generate excess heat my A/C unit has to deal with! :-)

  • Speeding up modern Ubuntu boot not easy... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Sits ( 117492 ) on Saturday March 24, 2007 @04:01PM (#18473313) Homepage Journal
    Ever since Ubuntu Edgy much of the low hanging fruit in speeding up the Ubuntu boot has already been taken. Looking at the bootcharts for my system [ubuntu.com] since then shows remarkably little time when the CPU is idle once the base kernel has finished loading. This means that running anything more in parallel simply won't net me anything (in fact scheduler overhead and disk thrashing may in theory make things slower).

    For example, there is an improvement in the time it takes for the clock to appear from "Ubuntu Dapper Flight 3 Default kernel" to "Ubuntu Feisty Herd 5 generic kernel". The Ubuntu folks worked hard to try an eliminate sleeps from their initscripts and when a sleep was unavoidable they would run other parts of the startup process in parallel. They also made changes to Xorg to prevent it (re)reading so much stuff on launch [fooishbar.org]. There was also the introduction of the readahead script which tries to arrange for as much of the boot time reading to be done in one big chunk. Throughput is higher when the disk is only reading and can utilise it's readahead. An attempt is also made to try and request files in the order in which they are laid out on disk (to minimise disk seeks which hurt performance). In Feisty a move was made to using dash instead of bash for scripts [ubuntu.com] because it was smaller and executes scripts faster.

    The only things that seem to win me any gain over the default Ubuntu Feisty install are turning off initscripts for services I absolutely won't use (e.g. ipv4 autoconfig via avahi) and reducing the number of restricted binary driver modules being probed (I have long noticed that the only benefit that recompiling the kernel gives to boot speed is that you can simply leave out features not on your computer making the initial kernel startup where it probes for things you might not have (like which software RAID is faster) a shade faster). It is also worth noting that Ubuntu starts X quite early and continues loading services afterwards which means the gain from disabling one of these "after X" services (like CUPS) isn't so noticeable (but might mean your desktop actually starts responding to clicks a bit sooner).

    Profiling the boot to try and improve the readahead takes a long time to run - the profile run seems to take three times as long as a regular boot. It could be argued that you will never gain back the extra time you waited on the profile run...

    I suspect reducing the boot further will start to need more complicated procedures, perhaps reordering modprobe.conf [redhat.com] and reducing the amount of needless reading of files [livejournal.com]. Eventually you end up having to do the same tricks as Windows/OSX - e.g. working out where the fastest part of the disk is and copying every file needed to boot there [kernelthread.com], bringing up the network cardafter the desktop has started [microsoft.com], periodically defraging bits of the disk, prelinking [redhat.com]...

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