A Look At The Speedy Clear Linux Boot Time Versus Ubuntu 19.10

[bug77]

I opened the article expecting to see some bootchart graphs comparisons. No dice.

[Guest]

This. At least on my system, boot takes about about 14s, about 7s from UEFI and 7s systemd. While dropping my boot time to 8s would be great, it wouldn't be making my boot instantaneous.

Replacing firmware is an option too. I use Coreboot with a GRUB payload to drive down my boot times even further than they were. If your hardware is compatible, consider giving it a try.

[Guest]

Most distros are preloaded with bunch of useless staff for normal desktop. Once I started with ubuntu minimal 18.04 and install only things i needed (and still removed few services) boot times shortened by large margin. Then install pure desktop package without a ton of $hitty plugins and childish effects, akonadi, avahi, indexers etc..

Using sockets rather than services wherever applicable, disabling things like LVM when you don't use them is a way to gain some performance as well. Changing initramfs compression format (and picking what's inside of it wisely) can be a nice win. I also try to delay connecting to networks late into boot, to the point where I get to X with my environment fully up before my computer connects to a network.

[josh_walrath]

hurray! the hibernation/sleep doesn't work fine on half of the laptops under the linux, but at least the kernel now boots in 0.3 sec! whoop whoop!

Well, probably most laptops running Linux are filled with Linux-incompatible hardware. That compatibility can't be extended unless all hardware drivers are reverse-engineered and re-deployed as Linux natives by some phantom singularity of unbounded resources and productivity.

So you gotta curate! Even on desktops: does the new mobo you're eyeing only have a Marvell chip as its ethernet NIC? You know it's gonna be trouble under Linux. So pick the one with the Intel chip. Sucks, but what are you going to do? Borderlands 2's new DLC isn't Linux native even though Borderlands 2 now is. SUCKS, but what. Are. You. Gonna. Do. Can't have everything. Not yet. Not this century. Next one, maybe.

[polarathene]

Around 35 seconds from power on to exiting the bootloader so the system can initialize.

2016 i5-6500 Skylake system with SSD for boot. 7 seconds to reach the DisplayManager(SSDM) iirc, about 5-6 seconds to reach usable Plasma desktop from there(last timed via stopwatch and systemd-analyze from power on back in 2017). Kernel loads in ~650ms and userspace ~450ms, not much time in bootloader(50ms?) bulk is from the UEFI I think. Also on Manjaro.

[polarathene]

I opened the article expecting to see some bootchart graphs comparisons. No dice.

Even just the additional info/breakdown from systemd-analyze would be useful here. I'm curious what was eating up time in the Ryzen system.

[arQon]

Some time ago Ubuntu also started up network and modem drivers. Not everyone needs PPP and 56k modem drivers these days. Anyway seems funny that suddenly everyone cares about boot time. Like I said few days ago, I don't think the Linux boot time is that big of a problem, the firmware UEFI initialization takes a lot longer on many systems.

This for me as well. 80+% of my boot time is garbage services added by Ubuntu / systemd that have absolutely no business running at boot time: mandb regeneration, for example. The maintainer's position is "well, on an SSD and a fast machine..." and "well, it's not a BLOCKING task, because systemd", and so on, completely (and wilfully) glossing over the fact that if you IO-block the entire machine with this sort of garbage, the supposed parallelism simply doesn't exist at all (because apparently they've also never heard of ionice). When you also add in apt and snapd tasks that block on the network coming up first, and then make the desktop login depend on those as well, machines that used to boot (userspace) in under 10s are now taking 30+s. So the maintainer excuse list extends to "well, booting is rare, and *I* want my machine to finish this stuff before I login, so f**k you". Because *his* use case is the only one that matters, and VMs etc that are brought up and down daily are irrelevant.

TL;DR - Shaving 2.7s off boot time is pure e-peen waving in the first place, and it's even more irrelevant when bad startup service settings are adding literally 10x that to the system.

[Vistaus]

hurray! the hibernation/sleep doesn't work fine on half of the laptops under the linux, but at least the kernel now boots in 0.3 sec! whoop whoop!

Working fine for me on my Lenovo ThinkPad with 2017/2018 hardware.

[caligula]

2016 i5-6500 Skylake system with SSD for boot. 7 seconds to reach the DisplayManager(SSDM) iirc, about 5-6 seconds to reach usable Plasma desktop from there(last timed via stopwatch and systemd-analyze from power on back in 2017). Kernel loads in ~650ms and userspace ~450ms, not much time in bootloader(50ms?) bulk is from the UEFI I think. Also on Manjaro.

That's pretty much the best you can have at the moment. Too bad the firmware is so slow.

[caligula]

Replacing firmware is an option too. I use Coreboot with a GRUB payload to drive down my boot times even further than they were. If your hardware is compatible, consider giving it a try.

Yea right. I've owned dozens of computers and none of them had coreboot support. There was one old AMD64 board that almost had the same model number as the one officially supported by coreboot. Tried flashing and bricked the system. Apparently you need a totally different BIOS if you have a mini atx board with less features than the full board.