How Intel's Clear Linux Team Cut The Kernel Boot Time From 3 Seconds To 300 ms

[phoronix]

Phoronix: How Intel's Clear Linux Team Cut The Kernel Boot Time From 3 Seconds To 300 ms

Intel engineer Feng Tang spoke at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal on how the Clear Linux team managed to boot their kernel faster. They started out with around a three second kernel boot time but cut it down to just 300 ms...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Clear-Linux-Kernel-3s-to-300ms

[mlau]

It seems there's still a lot to gain by throwing away old x86 baggage (UEFI, ACPI). 500ms just to get linux to load is a lot of time when the CPU runs at >2GHz.

[skeevy420]

It seems there's still a lot to gain by throwing away old x86 baggage (UEFI, ACPI). 500ms just to get linux to load is a lot of time when the CPU runs at >2GHz.

Not to mention portables where it may need to get further into the boot process to be able to throttle itself and save energy.

EDIT:
In before the whoop-tee-doo crowd

[Azrael5]

How linux teams are incompetents. The evidence.

[profoundWHALE]

How linux teams are incompetents. The evidence.

That's "incompetent" not "incompetents" because you already made team plural.

Also I can't tell if this is supposed to be a question or a statement.

[kokoko3k]

So if i understand well from the PDF, what can be done right now without too much work is:
Probing drivers in async way
Use lz4 to compress (needs kernel rebuild?)
boot with mem=xxxxm (but how to add the memory back?)

[R41N3R]

Intel should maybe look at UEFI first, that beast wastes 30 seconds on my normal desktop systems! Even if my kernel would need 5 seconds to boot instead of 3, I wouldn't even notice this difference!

[kokoko3k]

How linux teams are incompetents. The evidence.

Damn, i can't join any linux team or i will be an incompetent; thanks for pointing it out, you're a lifesaver.
I'm still not sure how you call the "Intel's Clear Linux Team (tm)", but that's enough.

Seriously, as often happens in Opensource software, features and optimizations are added when they are needed by developers.

[kokoko3k]

Intel should maybe look at UEFI first, that beast wastes 30 seconds on my normal desktop systems! Even if my kernel would need 5 seconds to boot instead of 3, I wouldn't even notice this difference!

Is your particular "UEFI"/"Bios"/Firmware implementation to be slow, not the UEFI itself.
Old, but still relevant:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5793/...yte-and-msi/14
Also, probably there are config knobs in your firmware motherboard to switch that will make his POST faster.

[nuetzel]

Great read. Thanks Intel. Even as AMD...