FreeBSD Shortening Its Boot Time, ASLR By Default & Better Intel WiFi Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeBSD Shortening Its Boot Time, ASLR By Default & Better Intel WiFi Support

In addition to releasing FreeBSD 13.1-BETA1, the FreeBSD project also published its Q4'2021 status report to recap all of the open-source activities achieved for this BSD operating system during the past quarter...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-Q4-2021-Status

[ehansin]

I have this in the past, but more recently have been doing some FreeBSD installs in VirtualBox just to keep getting a feel for it. I have not used it in this capacity, but seems like it might make a nice file server with the built in by default ZFS and then running Samba, especially now that FreeBSD and Linux ZFS are using the same codebase. I am getting more and more interested in lightweight and simple installs, whatever the OS (yes, Linux can do this.) Anyway, good to see progress.

[Danielsan]

It doesn't bother me the boot's slowness of FreeBSD however still feels weird in 2022...

[dreich]

ASLR By Default

Better late than never. Almost 20 years after OpenBSD!

[kpedersen]

the boot's slowness of FreeBSD however still feels weird in 2022...

Strange. You prefer the boot speed of Windows?

[Danielsan]

The Windows workstation at my job boots in less than 5 second I guess... 🤔

[skeevy420]

Strange. You prefer the boot speed of Windows?

Why wouldn't most people?

When I pick Windows 10 from the GRUB entry it takes 5 (or more) seconds to be at the Windows login screen. Manjaro takes 10 (or more) seconds from the same GRUB screen. The (or more) is the occasional cache rebuilding, etc after updates. That happens with both of them. Windows is on an NVME and Manjaro an SSD. Anecdotally, I've seen similar posts over the years....and was beaten to the punch with yet another anecdotal post when writing my anecdotal experience post....

In my experiences Windows 10 is extremely slow when booting from a spinning HDD and nearly every Linux distribution boots faster than 10 on the same model of HDD.

[stormcrow]

I have this in the past, but more recently have been doing some FreeBSD installs in VirtualBox just to keep getting a feel for it. I have not used it in this capacity, but seems like it might make a nice file server with the built in by default ZFS and then running Samba, especially now that FreeBSD and Linux ZFS are using the same codebase. I am getting more and more interested in lightweight and simple installs, whatever the OS (yes, Linux can do this.) Anyway, good to see progress.

I've used it for exactly that purpose - ZFS mirrors served via Samba. For some reason it always idled at 10W more than on the same machine with Debian (35W on FreeBSD vs. 25W on Debian). I didn't really dig in why beyond trying out powerd and power++. I've read FreeBSD plays ultra safe on not trusting ACPI tables so the CPU didn't idle properly might be the cause. I might dig in deeper sometime in the future and find out if it can be better tuned. Right now everything is packed away for a long distance move.

[stormcrow]

The Windows workstation at my job boots in less than 5 second I guess... 🤔

Windows cheats by default. It uses a hybrid boot mode that's a cross between a cold boot and hibernation. That's why it boots "fast". The proper test on how fast Windows boots in the same way FreeBSD does is to restart Windows. They aren't the same sequence in Windows. It usually takes 2x-3x as long to restart than it does to boot from shutdown.

Either way, on modern desktop and laptop PCs the real hold up for boot times is usually the POST + firmware initialization. OSes boot in mere seconds on fast storage media.

FWIW, my M1 Macbook Pro from cold start is at log in screen before either my desktop or laptop PCs, a Ryzen 3600 & Intel 8th gen respectively with NVME storage, get much further than OS handoff.

Edit to add: I'm sure large server admins would appreciate shaving off every second. They need to spin up quickly. Seconds add up when you're in charge of spinning up and down thousands of hardware servers, VMs, and containers.

[er888kh]

Why wouldn't most people?

When I pick Windows 10 from the GRUB entry it takes 5 (or more) seconds to be at the Windows login screen. Manjaro takes 10 (or more) seconds from the same GRUB screen. The (or more) is the occasional cache rebuilding, etc after updates. That happens with both of them. Windows is on an NVME and Manjaro an SSD. Anecdotally, I've seen similar posts over the years....and was beaten to the punch with yet another anecdotal post when writing my anecdotal experience post....

In my experiences Windows 10 is extremely slow when booting from a spinning HDD and nearly every Linux distribution boots faster than 10 on the same model of HDD.

Manjaro can definitely be improved. It has a couple of scripts that take the majority of time. have you tried "systemd-analyze plot" ?