How fast does your PC boot?

[fackamato]

Hi,

Just spent some hours tweaking my Archlinux install on my OCZ Vertex 60GB SSD. I dedicated 10GB to Archlinux, currently just over 5GB is being used. Specifications:

Laptop, Dell Inspiron 1520
CPU: Intel T8300 (2.4 C2D 3MB)
GFX: NVIDIA 8600M GT 256MB DDR2 (nvidia driver 185.13, xorg 1.6, gnome 2.26.0)
MEM: 2*2048MB Corsair Value 667MHz
HDD: none
SSD: OCZ Vertex 60GB with firmware 1275 and 64K partition alignment

I'm using ext4:

UUID=3cdd02eb-7cdf-4772-bd6a-ed4a791a0e0e    /    ext4    noload,nodiratime,rw,barrier=0,nobh,commit=15,nouser_xattr    0    1

See the thread here for information on how to reduce boot time: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=69086

As you can see it boots from GRUB to console login in 9 seconds. To see how fast it would boot to X, I enabled auto login in GDM and added Firefox with about:cache as a startup application in Gnome. From GRUB to Firefox fully loaded takes 16 seconds.

What tweaks have you applied to your systems? I'm currently trying to benchmark my SSD with different filesystems. So far I've come to the conclusion that the deadline scheduler with some tweaks (see below) is the fastest.

echo 0 > /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational
echo 4 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/writes_starved
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch
echo 256 > /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_requests
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

I'm using kernel 2.6.29-zen3-ARCH-20090404-08318-g1e28aa5 (zen-sources), I think you need some 2.6.29 for /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational to exist. I'm not sure what impact that setting has yet, though.

I also created a ramdisk and moved some stuff over there:

mkdir /dev/shm/tmp
mount -o bind /dev/shm/tmp /tmp
mkdir -p /dev/shm/var/abs/local
mount -o bind /dev/shm/var/abs/local /var/abs/local
mkdir /dev/shm/ramdisk
mount -o bind /dev/shm/ramdisk /home/fackamato/ramdisk
mkdir -p /dev/shm/var/log
mount -o bind /dev/shm/var/log /var/log
chmod 1777 /tmp
chmod 1777 /home/fackamato/ramdisk
chmod 1777 /var/abs/local

Also one very important bit: Removing any vga= parameter from the kernel command line speeds up things a lot. So, just plain low-res text boot really speeds it up.

[enteon]

lenny boots in about 1'30'' to 2' depending on how many stuff was still open when exiting kde.

tweaks: fast hdd

oh and: fsck of 400gb / every 2 weeks takes *some* time :-D

[mendieta]

Ver cool stuff fackamato! How do you specify in bootchart to stop the stopwatch right after firefox?

I am doing something similar with a script I wrote. It's a very pedestrian approach, but it has the advantage of appending one line to the same file after each boot automatically with the boot time so I can compare easily. I am also doing autologin, and opening and closing immediatley one xterm (should be much faster than firefox) before stamping the time. I am getting this:

grisell: ~> cat ~/boot_time.log
Fri Apr 10 23:30:01 EDT 2009. Boot time [s] : 80
Sat Apr 11 11:14:12 EDT 2009. Boot Time [s]: 202
Sat Apr 11 11:24:59 EDT 2009. Boot Time [s]: 78

In the 202s boot I added "profile" at the grub prompt, apparently this gave a modest speedup (2.5% or so, but it could be just statistical noise)

This is in my old Sempron system, specs here:

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=profile&u=mendieta-31767-266-5151

My eeepc 701 with Kubuntu 8.04 is booting in about the same time from the ssd drive. Specs here:

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=santisofi-13916-13157-18141

It is amazing how much an ssd card helps to boot up quickly! Reads are a blast. Note that that the eee systems is a lot slower than the sempron. Actually, the same eeepc with Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 nightly build from an sdhc is booting in 45 seconds! (the sdhc reads are slower than an ssd). Using ext4 instead of ext3 gave about a 10% speedup.

Cheers!