Booting With Mandriva's Speedboot

[mirza]

Seems X alone takes 6 fucking seconds to start before gnome is launched ! What it can be doing for such a long time? Visual Basic application can start faster then 5 seconds.

[AdamW]

energyman: except, if you carefully read the article - or, better, Fred's post - http://blog.crozat.net/2009/02/speedboot-explained.html - you would see that that is not as optimized as this. Mandriva has already been doing that, by default, since 2006.

[energyman]

Um. I'm surprised you guys missed this one. Your Ubuntu / Mandriva comparison:

"Without Speedboot, Mandriva 2009.1 booted in 27 seconds, which is actually six seconds longer than what it took to boot Ubuntu 9.04 on the same netbook."

is entirely flawed. The biggest reason: er, you're comparing GDM startup time to GNOME startup time. Look at the Ubuntu graph - it stops when GDM comes up. Look at the Mandriva graph - it stops when gnome-panel comes up. That's a fairly gigantic difference right there. I guess you were using auto-login on MDV but not Ubuntu?

Contributory: Ubuntu does not start a firewall by default. If you look at the MDV graph, shorewall initialization is a big time-taker.

Compare Ubuntu-with-firewall or Mandriva-without-firewall, and either both booting to GDM or both booting to GNOME. please. Or remove the comparison.

you forgot phornonix first directive:
ubunutu is great and the best. So don't expect 'fairness'.

[energyman]

gentoo - just put xdm in boot runlevel - together with consolekit, dbus, hal - and turn on parallel startup.

Done.

Possible for AGES. Just without flashy buzzwords.

[AdamW]

Significant error: Ubuntu / Mandriva comparison entirely flawed

Um. I'm surprised you guys missed this one. Your Ubuntu / Mandriva comparison:

"Without Speedboot, Mandriva 2009.1 booted in 27 seconds, which is actually six seconds longer than what it took to boot Ubuntu 9.04 on the same netbook."

is entirely flawed. The biggest reason: er, you're comparing GDM startup time to GNOME startup time. Look at the Ubuntu graph - it stops when GDM comes up. Look at the Mandriva graph - it stops when gnome-panel comes up. That's a fairly gigantic difference right there. I guess you were using auto-login on MDV but not Ubuntu?

Contributory: Ubuntu does not start a firewall by default. If you look at the MDV graph, shorewall initialization is a big time-taker.

Compare Ubuntu-with-firewall or Mandriva-without-firewall, and either both booting to GDM or both booting to GNOME. please. Or remove the comparison.

[WSmart]

Some people don't like change. :P

I like the idea of getting the data input out of the way ASAP. The sooner that's done, the sooner I can switch to something else. I wish we had this with OS installs where all user data is entered at the start of the process. Makes more sense. It's not so much the boot time, but the wait time. Once you log in, you can go get cup of java or if you're already had your coffee....

The time difference is likely more significant with a regular hard drive. I was thinking today how much I love the sound of hard drive chatter. Back with the 5400rpm drives and 384MB of RAM, seemed like the hard drive was always under load. Solid state is ok, but I just think the modern hard drive is cool as s-h-information technology. And it just keeps getting better.

Thanks for the post. Thanks all!

Be real, be sober.

[mibo]

Wrong test hardware

Sorry, but I think this test is really only useful for netbook users.

The annoying part of a long boot time comes from the fact that your common workstation is waiting for devices and services being initialized. A speedup should be seen when the initialization is reordered or run in parallel on your dual and quad core cpus.

Using the slowest available cpu and a ssd which is optimized for linear reads/writes instead of good random access performance is exactly not the way to do.

Just my two cents
mibo

[Stedevil]

Wow, optimizing the time needed to show GDM... very helpful.

It is. Of course one can do it the stupid way like Windows, but if you do it smart its actually an advantage. Eg, how likely are you to print a document before GDM is even started? Doesnt it make absolutely no sense at all to start cups before GDM on a desktop? Surely that can be done at a later time after login, possibly even as a background event limited to max 5% of CPU time (unless deliberately requested by the user by eg trying to print something).

[tuxdriver]

My definition of boot time: The period of time it takes from pushing the power button to a usable desktop (by usable I mean at most 5% CPU load). Optimize that and I'm impressed.

Try Puppy Linux and you'll be amazed.

[LinuxAffenMann]

Wow, optimizing the time needed to show GDM... very helpful. That's so wrong and as already stated bringing "good old" Windows feeling to Linux. Why not just let the user put in the login data at GRUB and discard GDM? *head-shaking*

Same thing's happening in Ubuntu (likely less radical):

* debian/initscripts:
- etc/init.d/bootlogs.sh: separate out things from bootmisc.sh that aren't urgent to do before gdm.

My definition of boot time: The period of time it takes from pushing the power button to a usable desktop (by usable I mean at most 5% CPU load). Optimize that and I'm impressed.