Ubuntu 11.10 Down To 12-Second Boot 221
deadeyefred writes "Even though it's still only in alpha, it appears as though the forthcoming version of Ubuntu, version 11.10, will be much faster than earlier versions, according to this story. Quoting: 'After installing the OS onto a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3.00 GHz and a hard disk drive, we stop-watched boot-up time at 12 seconds — more than three seconds faster than the previous best time we’ve measured.' It looks as if the switch from GDM to LightDM will have a significant impact as Ubuntu gets closer to 'instant on' status."
HDD -- SSD (Score:3)
I wonder what the boot time would be with SSDs?
Re:HDD -- SSD (Score:4, Informative)
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You'll spend more time in the POST than you will booting the OS up...
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Well, except that with many intel graphics systems, you have to choose between different sets of drivers that are broken in different ways (both open source and closed), so, yeah, the exact problem referred to upthread is particularly likely.
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I was wondering why you got marked flame bait. I agree with you, for the most part.
The Linux community, especially the people working on driver technology, need to come to some common ground so the hardware folks don't have such a hard time supporting Linux. I'm rooting for Linux in the long run, but I don't see how they will hit any significant desktop numbers without some serious standardization on the driver front (like an ABI).
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Sorry, I gotta argue that one. The proprietary drivers always work better than the open source Xorg drivers. I've not experienced a single case in which the Xorg drivers actually equalled the proprietary drivers. They often come close, these days, which is a huge improvement over what we had 5 years ago. But, they are still not up to snuff.
That said - it's simply not that big a deal to go to nVidia or to ATI/AMD to find the driver. I disagree with Hairy Feet when he makes it into a big deal.
Hell, with
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I've not experienced a single case in which the Xorg drivers actually equalled the proprietary drivers.
I assume you haven't used the ATI drivers, then. IME, the open source drivers are much more stable and easy to get working than fglrx.
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Sadly, ATI/AMD only offers support for newer kernels, AND newer cards. In order to get drivers for older cards, you have to use older kernels. There is no proprietary driver for 2.6.39 kernel and an old AGP video card. But, in that case, you still have the Xorg driver to fall back on. And, let's face it - people who demand the best video performance aren't going to be running a six year old card anyway.
I was an avid supporter of ATI, until they started discontinuing support for those older cards. My la
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What drivers are people downloading? Running either (K)ubuntu or debian, I never hunt for a driver... at worst, I install it with aptitude or some other apt frontend.
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I think you sorta misinterpreted my post. Windows is very efficient with driver installation. They are the BEST, because every vendor in the world wants to be Windows certified.
It's all the OTHER stuff, after installation is finished, that I was referring to. You've got to find all the installation disks for your favorite programs, you've got to get Adobe's stuff, whichever flavor of Java you prefer (almost always Sun Java, on Windows) along with your favorite antivirus, software firewall, anti-malware,
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Bullshit!
The nVidia drivers work just fine. If you're only doing 2d then there's nouveau. Otherwise the binary nVidia drivers with your distro of choice, or direct from nVidia, work perfectly well.
Not only is X happy but steam and (quite a few) games run nicely under wine too.
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That's mostly true -- however, my MSI motherboard seems to spend 5 seconds in each of the AHCI controllers, with the annoying "Press Alt-F2 for RAID setup" message (and switching to IDE emulation makes ubuntu's Disk I/O roughly 25% slower in terms of boot time). Aside from that, I can hardly see my BIOS boot logo--it flashes and goes to GRUB.
Unfortunately Ubuntu seems to have poor support for UEFI at the moment... not too long ago, apt-get dist-upgrade was forcing me to remove grub-efi-amd64 in exchange for
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Well, I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 on an SSD. The boot time is subdivided as follows:
1) ~10 seconds for the BIOS to load and start grub
2) ~10 seconds for Ubuntu to get to the login screen
2.5) Optional 2 hour wait if Ubuntu decides to fsck all partitions again
3) Upon login, ~30 second wait while the Nvidia driver try to configure the HDMI video.
Overall, I can just about live with it. Unfortunately though, hibernate and suspend no longer work, so things could be a lot better.
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2.5) Optional 2 hour wait if Ubuntu decides to fsck all partitions again
It's not "ubuntu" that decides, it's the file system. You can stop it happening by setting the number of times the file system can be mounted before checking to 0 with tune2fs. For example:
tune2fs -c 0 /dev/sda1
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It's the distributor's responsibility to decide what the defaults should be...
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Make sure you're using EXT4 for your filesystem... it's really simple to upgrade, and you can basically change /etc/fstab, and optionally run some tune2fs parameters to enable extents if you are happy with making it permanent.
Just changing fstab to say "ext4" instead of "ext3" alone cuts fsck time by about a factor of 10 (but make sure your version of grub supports ext4 before turning on extents). My 900GB ext4 raid partition will fsck in roughly the same amount of time as my 20GB ext3 root partition
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It'll go from 4 seconds to ~3.2 seconds assuming boot is limited only by read speed. The bulk of the time will still be in POST, unfortunately. Anybody hear of new motherboards that have reduced POST times?
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I agree completely. It takes me longer to type in my password than it does to load the OS. I was just trying to point out that the time from boot loader to usable system is no longer the long pole and it might make sense to focus more on the hardware initialization side. I also think there's still room for HDDs where large amounts of storage space is needed, but I won't build another computer without a SSD to put the OS on, at least until something better comes along.
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On a desktop I would get a 8GB to 32GB SSD for the OS/boot partition and a large, 500GB+, HDD for the programs and everything else.
On a laptop a setup similar to above would be nice, but is not practical on most machines.
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There was work being done on bios's that were actually Linux boot loaders. They had times of ~5 seconds from start to a linux prompt, at which point the operating system took over. I lost track of things, really, but so summarize, it was only good on certain boards, and the focus of the project got muddied by a few things, funds are short, and basically they appear to have stopped development. In fact, they changed names at least once, maybe twice. There was a real lack of focus, it seems to me.
http://w [coreboot.org]
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That time has been beaten by a ThinkPad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FdRtzGyk9o [youtube.com]
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After sleep mode the average Mac (SSD or not) takes 1 sec to come out of sleep, about 1s out of hibernation. IF (does anyone still turn off their laptop?) you turn off or reboot you get to a login prompt in about 16s. Even on non-SSD machines this is about similar, Snow Leopard and Lion use compressed directories to store much of the system and let the (ultrafast) memory and CPU handle the uncompressing while using less (ultraslow) hard disk bandwidth and seek time. I guess if you can get a compressed EXT4
bootloader (Score:2)
does this include the bootloader?
Grub?
Lilo?
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So, you're saying that no one really uses Slackware?
Really?
I must be no one.
cheers,
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Saying Slackware doesn't support GRUB is like saying Dell doesn't support Linux. It's a bootloader, and aside from installing it, it's completely unrelated to the OS. They probably kept LILO as the default since it's works easily out of the box.
Just grab a copy of grub2, make, make install, install it to the bootloader, and set up a linux64 menu.lst to load into your OS. Unlike LILO, you can actually type in commands at the boot prompt and tab complete to get a list of OS's, so it's kind of hard to mess up
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Did someone say that Slackware didn't support grub? Where?
Rather, someone suggested that "no one really uses lilo." This is far from the truth.
Let's make up something else:
No one in this thread is lacking reading comprehension.
cheers,
Boot times? (Score:2)
How many people actually reboot their Linux systems? I guess if you're on a laptop you might sometimes, but I just use Sleep functionality instead of cycles.
Still, a good (even if by now esoteric) achievement.
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How many people actually reboot their Linux systems?
Anybody who applies a kernel update, now that Oracle has acquired Ksplice.
I guess if you're on a laptop you might sometimes, but I just use Sleep functionality instead of cycles.
My Dell Mini 10 runs Ubuntu 11.04. Leaving it in sleep for a couple days will fully drain the battery. So if I know I'm not going to be near a charger for several hours, I shut it down.
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That's honorable! I usually just leave them wondering about the mod.
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Hi, I've found that in most menuing systems (Windows XP primarily, although I use Ubuntu exclusively at home and it works similarly), if you left-click the "menu button" to open the menu, and then left-click and drag on the menu, you'll end up choosing a menu item much more often than if you left-click to open the menu, then move the mouse, then left-click again.
I've found that often (30%?) when I do the latter, I'll end up clicking outside of the menu, and possibly causing a side-effect. Whereas, if I lef
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I wasn't aware that Oracle had bought up Ksplice. That bites . . .
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Who'll make such a fork? (Score:2)
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I never used to, opting for sleep mode instead of shutdown. Now that I have SSDs I am able to use hibernate and get it to power back about as fast as sleep mode. Hibernate is basically shutdown with a ram image stored on the drive.
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My media PC gets shut off a lot (Score:3)
-B
Re:Boot times? (Score:4, Informative)
i get a 'restart your computer' message every other update.
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Hibernate takes forever to recover (I don't run only firefox...), so I don't use it.
Slep is Ok but for 2 or 3 times I forgot a laptop for several days and the battery got completely dead. Needless to say that its charge capacity is now around +-20%. Li-ion batteries should no be completely discharged.
Now I think twice before using sleep.
(I use Ubuntu)
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How many people actually reboot their Linux systems?
Probably at least a few more when this rolls out and sleep instead of shutdown only saves 12 seconds.
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That 12 seconds does not include restarting all your applications, typing in ssh agent passwords, and all the other foo required to resume your normal working environment.
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I can't believe ubuntu still takes that long. My laptop automatically starts apache, mysql, and a bunch of other services (I do web development on it) at startup and I'd be surprised if it took 10 seconds (not counting POST and grub timeouts).
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"a PC"?!? (Score:2)
...a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3.00 GHz and a hard disk drive...
Well, that's a specific Intel CPU, and we know it has an unspecified hard drive.
What actual hardware did they use, so that we can reproduce their results?
Thanks,
-- Terry
when did you start the timer? (Score:2)
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I have dual boot machine and only use Windows when I have to, Xp boots 40s for me (after boot screen). Although I have quite a lot programs installed (Virtuawin,Avast,uTorrent). On the other hand on Ubuntu I don't need antivirus, has multiple desktops by default and qtorrent loads pretty fast.
Also, it seems that as the number of intsalled buy not daemon programs can slow down Windows by the high amount of registry entries. On Linux it doesn't matter how many programs you install.
cool (Score:3)
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100% true. also, does anybody know of a distro that can be installed like wubi?
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100% true. also, does anybody know of a distro that can be installed like wubi?
Linux Mint?
Re:cool (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate Unity so much... I wiped the system and installed 10.04 again. I was perfectly happy with Gnome and the way things were set up.
The problem, is that it's form trumping functionality. I hate Windows because they push 'features' onto you even if you don't want them. Microsoft knows what you want, and if you don't want it that way, it just means the problem must be you.
The king of this trend is of course Apple, but then again they sell to a peculiar market anyway. It's like those people buy a car because it's pretty and do not even inquire about the mileage.
Ubuntu was free of it, but now they are going the same way. They decide what you want, if you want it or not.
Re:cool (Score:4, Informative)
I hate Unity so much... I wiped the system and installed 10.04 again.
That's crazy overkill; Unity is just the _default_ shell. Choose "Ubuntu Classic" from your login manager, and you'll see the familiar Gnome interface.
Re:cool (Score:4, Informative)
In 11.04. ISTR reading that GNOME 2.x goes away in 11.10, so yes, you're probably better off sticking with LTS until Canonical un-fucks their desktop environment.
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Hope they get over it before the next LTS, or I'll be distro shopping myself.
If you are presented with a choice of two desktops (as you are, if you have installed 11.04), and you can't manage to choose the one that you like that even comes pre-installed for your convenience, I recommend you go shopping for a mac :-)
(Seriously, WTF has happened to the tech knowledge of the average slashdotter recently? A few years ago every man and his dog was writing his own window manager from scratch, and now people don't even realise that the world outside of default settings exists...)
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Paragraphs: your friends and mine.
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Not for everyone. It works just fine for my family.
What point did they start timing? (Score:2)
Heck, my computer takes more than 12 seconds to hand over to any OS... I mean, graphics card initialization, POST, initializing 3 RAID controllers.... probably at least 15-20 seconds before the OS gets a chance... I'm pretty sure every modern OS I've tried on my machine can boot to a functional desktop on a fresh install in less time than the BIOS takes...
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Debian concurrent boot (Score:2)
Why does Ubuntu get all the credit? Isn't this Debian's new system for running init scripts concurrently at work?
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No, I wasn't; hadn't heard of Upstart. Debian does have a concurrent boot system, which is now the default in squeeze, but apparently this is an area where Debian and Ubuntu are doing their own things. I withdraw my original comment!
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1: It isn't new, it's been in testing/unstable for 2 years by now. 2: This isn't Debian's init system, because this takes longer to get to a usable desktop on a 2011 3GHz multicore than that takes on my eee701 with a 630MHz Celeron.
So what? (Score:2)
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Unless you use it as a desktop machine, and try to save power.
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I thought a major advantage of Linux was supposed to be that you only had to boot it once and then it ran forever...
A well deserved reputation. However there are such things as power interruptions, kernel upgrades, physical relocation of a workstation, hardware changes. My Shuttle SD11G5 running as a server (quiet enough for always-on in the home) has typical uptime of a few months.
There is also kernel development in which boot time can easily dominate the development cycle, indirectly affecting kernel quality and hence every user.
Same result here! (Score:3, Funny)
That's about how long it took me with Unity before I gave it the boot too!
Sweet! (Score:2)
Now ubuntu can go from cold boot to crashing apps faster than windows! Ah, bug #1 will be solved any day now.
P.S. Mint has been better since 9.04
LightDM (Score:2)
I am glad to see the use of LightDM -- hopefully this reduction of bloat on the desktop will continue. It is not just a matter of boot times but also CPU & RAM usage. This might not seem important of a new top of the range machine, but is great when running on a netbook or a PC that is affordable in the 3rd world.
One of the nice things about Linux was that it was lean & mean, then the desktop guys trashed that reputation.
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yes, until LightDM reaches feature parity with GDM at which point it will be labelled "bloated" and there will be a new EvenLighterDM project start up and so it goes on.
Boot times mean nothing (Score:2)
Boot time vs. actually doing something useful (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree. My BIOS on my htpc takes 15-20 seconds to post, then 12 seconds to boot into mythtv THEN xbmc for a frontend, and is ready to actually use - you can use the remote and select a recording to watch. Installed on a SSD.
It's almost doing something useful (Score:2)
My eeepc with the
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I dunno, KDE tends to login in about 5-10 seconds and you're usually ready to go straight away.
Your claim of a few minutes is overstated.
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That would be
Boot + Load Browser + Connect to Internet + Fetch Page
Lubuntu (Score:2)
What a time saving (Score:3)
I wonder how much development time has been wasted saving you 12 seconds per month?
Development time that could have been used fixing Gnome3, PulseAudio, Systemd......
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None whatsoever, because the people that hardcore into systems work probably wouldn't work on PulseAudio if you held them at gunpoint.
Does this include USB initialization? (Score:2)
I've messed around with embedded ARM Linux boards from Technologic Systems. They claim sub-2.0 second boot times on most of their products. However, that's booting to Busybox. Okay, no big deal for an embedded system. But the big time hog is initializing the USB system. If you have devices plugged in on startup, I'm seeing boot times approaching 10 seconds.
Autologin and WLAN keys (Score:2)
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You realize that you can easily remove the password prompt on the keyring by nuking your keyring and not entering a password when it asks for it the next time?
That said, I still have to enter my password on my laptop, despite using autologin, because I have it set to lock the screen on startup. (prefer entering password through locked screen, because the network and other services start up earlier).
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Fast enough HD to restore all of RAM (Score:2)
Hibernation?
Provided your hardware is fully supported. A lot of PCs that I've used have no video or no sound after coming out of hibernation. And provided that your hard drive is fast enough to restore the entirety of RAM from the swap file faster than a 12-second boot.
I will savour the three seconds which I save each half a year.
If you reboot only twice a year, how do you remain protected against newly discovered (and fixed) defects in the kernel or other long-running processes?
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I've never been able to get any PC with an ATI card to hibernate correctly in linux, and I've found very little help on the topic. The best document I've found about the suspend process is here, and it is specific only to Ubuntu:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnderstandingSuspend [ubuntu.com]
Suspend works on my laptop, but it will overheat when I place it in my bag. I really would like to get hibernate to work.
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Re:What a time-saver! (Score:4, Insightful)
Those extra three seconds during my monthly reboot are really going to add up!
That's what I was thinking. If the only advantage of switching from GDM to LightDM is that they can book 3 seconds faster, it's not worth it. Going from 15 seconds to 12 seconds is not significant at all.
In fact, here's a simpler rule. If you need to use your stopwatch to determine whether the boot sequence got faster or not, then it's not significant.
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That depends if it's processor bound. I have a feeling the disk is pretty important, maybe more important.
With a bit of tweaking I managed to get debian squeeze to boot on my netbook in 20 seconds, on an atom processor. I think the SSD is probably the key there.
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