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f.kater
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Joined: 23 May 2002
Posts: 342
Location: Berlin
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 Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2002 9:45 am Post subject: boot even faster (silly idea?) |
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Hi,
gentoo boots very fast and I am completely happy with it - but I'd like to ask you if it was possible to speed up this process even more - especially for users who boot directly into gnome or kde:
Couldn't we compile everything what is necessary as a basis to use gnome or kde into one big piece of code which is loaded in the same way the kernel is loaded (just one big block)?
Maybe this sounds completely silly to the programmers point of view - but if it was possible then gentoo would probably the first who could do it since its advantage is to be able to compile everything from scratch.
Thank You |
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sentenza
n00b
Joined: 05 Dec 2002
Posts: 30
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2002 1:07 pm Post subject: Re: boot even faster (silly idea?) |
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| f.kater wrote: | Hi,
gentoo boots very fast and I am completely happy with it - but I'd like to ask you if it was possible to speed up this process even more - especially for users who boot directly into gnome or kde:
Couldn't we compile everything what is necessary as a basis to use gnome or kde into one big piece of code which is loaded in the same way the kernel is loaded (just one big block)?
Maybe this sounds completely silly to the programmers point of view - but if it was possible then gentoo would probably the first who could do it since its advantage is to be able to compile everything from scratch.
Thank You |
So you'll get a beautiful M$ like OS : no way to have X or KDE crashing without rebooting. And i think that you would a need a huge amount of ram to boot it.
Yes, this sound completely silly to me  |
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lx
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Joined: 28 May 2002
Posts: 1012
Location: Netherlands
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2002 4:54 pm Post subject: |
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Maybe what could be done is execute startup scripts in parallel (cause some scripts have a sleep statement etc), but compiling everything in one big chuck would not make it incredible fast (loading or otherwise), besides a small change needs a very very very long compile, and I don't want to recompile a big package everyday. I still need to update openoffice to r2....
Startup time is already great, after everything is loaded (which needs 10 / 20 seconds) it stays in memory. If you want better start up times, hardware makers should find a better way of transporting data between storage and cpu, it seems they only are trying to dump faster and faster cpu's while PCI-bus and especially harddrives stay behind.
Cya lX.
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f.kater
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Joined: 23 May 2002
Posts: 342
Location: Berlin
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2002 5:53 pm Post subject: Re: boot even faster (silly idea?) |
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| sentenza wrote: | | So you'll get a beautiful M$ like OS : no way to have X or KDE crashing without rebooting. |
I'm not gonna make a big issue out of my (silly) idea - but it's NOT a M$ like OS what you get: Loading everything at once doesn't mean that it's just one process. And, in the contrary to M$ you could optimize its components.
I was thinking of something similar to a live boot CD like knoppix. Would be great if I could just more or less "copy" a (heavily tested) default or personal more or less basic linux system stored in a few files to a free partition of my friend's none-linux computers or my new router etc. and load it like switching on a calculator ...
Thanks |
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lx
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Joined: 28 May 2002
Posts: 1012
Location: Netherlands
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| Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2002 8:31 pm Post subject: Re: boot even faster (silly idea?) |
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| f.kater wrote: | | I was thinking of something similar to a live boot CD like knoppix. Would be great if I could just more or less "copy" a (heavily tested) default or personal more or less basic linux system stored in a few files to a free partition of my friend's none-linux computers or my new router etc. and load it like switching on a calculator ... |
'mmmm one or more files doesn't mather you can copy a partition to another without breaking it (well you need 2 changes) but making it usuable on different computers like knoppix you need redundance and less restrictive optimisations and a good startup system which detects all hardware. But I think gnu/linux is portable as it is, well I mean also a binary system of an installed gnu/linux system, gnu/linux is ofcourse portable.
Cya lX.
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BigRedDot
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Joined: 29 Oct 2002
Posts: 67
Location: Austin
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| Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2002 5:48 am Post subject: |
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If you want a machine to boot faster, you need to take the hard drive out of the equation, not compile things differently. The folks at the LinixBios have done this by simply replacing a PC bios with linux itself. Current fastest boot is apparently 3 seconds. This product was developed so that nodes of the large linux cluster supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore could be brought up quickly. But it's avaliable to anyone who wants to tinker.
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syadnom
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Joined: 09 May 2002
Posts: 531
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| Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2003 4:45 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | If you want a machine to boot faster, you need to take the hard drive out of the equation, not compile things differently. |
ever run BeOS? it boots in seconds. my system will boot BeOS in UNDER 12 seconds. im looking for a way to make linux do this.
questions.
1) is having the kernel in a compressed format (bzImage is a compressed image right?) slowing do my booting?
2) would it work better to remove some of my init programs out of init and have them start up afterwards?
for example.
remove samba from init, and cupsd, etc &
add them to a startup script to run with gdm(xdm autoloads gdm) :
/etc/init.d/samba start &
/etc/init.d/cupsd start &
/etc/init.d/lisa start &
would this do anything? these services add ~3 seconds to my boot up, among other programs. which leads to :
3)will linux load these services faster in paralell?
4) would loading modules work faster in this way also?
i would think that having commands to load all your modules and service in paralell added to xsession might speed up loading these modules BUT how much of a performance hit would their be from accessing all this from the hard drive at the same time...? |
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zojas
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Joined: 22 Apr 2002
Posts: 1138
Location: Phoenix, AZ
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| Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2003 7:19 pm Post subject: |
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| syadnom wrote: |
2) would it work better to remove some of my init programs out of init and have them start up afterwards?
for example.
remove samba from init, and cupsd, etc &
add them to a startup script to run with gdm(xdm autoloads gdm) :
/etc/init.d/samba start &
/etc/init.d/cupsd start &
/etc/init.d/lisa start &
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the elegant way to do that is not to write another script, but to create a virtual runlevel. it's easy too. for example:
| Code: | mkdir /etc/runlevels/servers
rc-update del samba default
rc-update add samba servers
rc-update del cupsd default
rc-update add cupsd servers
rc-update del lisa default
rc-update add lisa servers
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then after boot when you want to start those up you just do this:
check out
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/rc-scripts.xml
for details |
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ebrostig
Bodhisattva
Joined: 20 Jul 2002
Posts: 3152
Location: Orlando, Fl
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| Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2003 7:25 pm Post subject: |
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Excuse me for asking, but why on earth is it important if the system boots in 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds? Unless you are constantly rebooting your machine, I couldn't care less if it even took 5 minutes to boot!
I only reboot my machines after upgrading the kernel and frankly I can wait whatever time it takes.
There are quite a few other areas where I would like to see more effort put into it. One of them is X-windows optimizing.
IMHO putting effort into getting the system to boot faster, is a waste of resources if you ask me.
Erik
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war
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Joined: 27 Apr 2002
Posts: 13
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| Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2003 8:41 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, this would require a major effort; and there's no real advantage.
If you wanna optimize your bootup speed, make sure you're not starting up any unnecessary services. Fiddle with your init scripts. You can choose the order to start them in--you don't have to do it with a separate command. S01Service will start before S50Service, and so on; make sure your GUI starts up ASAP, and let the other services start in the background.
It should be possible to speed up your boot process considerably that way. |
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pjp
Administrator
Joined: 16 Apr 2002
Posts: 20067
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| Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2003 12:06 am Post subject: |
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Personally I think it is ridiculous that there hasn't been an improvement in boot times by now (read < 5 secs.). If someone is interested in the project, why is it a waste?
John C. Dvorak's The Instant-On Computer is an interesting read.
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nikai
Apprentice
Joined: 02 Oct 2002
Posts: 270
Location: Kitzbühel, Austria
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| Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2003 12:51 am Post subject: |
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Minit claims to be a fast replacement for SysVinit: http://www.fbunet.de/minit.shtml
I haven't installed it yet, but I'm really tempted to try it on my laptop. |
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henke
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Joined: 30 Sep 2002
Posts: 165
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
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| Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2003 1:37 am Post subject: |
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Being able to boot of a custom rom chip gives you some very interesting possibilities
Imagine having a rom that downloads a ram image over the network instead of from flash memory. If you have 256 mb ram and 1 gbit/s ethernet it would take what 2 seconds to boot. Lets say 8 seconds to boot because of ehternet frame collision (don't remember the term for this)
Wan't to install a new os on your 300 diskless workstations? Just point the image server to a new ram image.  |
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pjp
Administrator
Joined: 16 Apr 2002
Posts: 20067
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| Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2003 1:53 am Post subject: |
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fast booting with serel might also be of interest.
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syadnom
Guru
Joined: 09 May 2002
Posts: 531
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| Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2003 6:04 am Post subject: well... |
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fastboot is good if:
you are using a laptop - is it really ok to take 5 minutes to boot your laptop?
you are doalbooting to some other OS, if it takes 7 Minutes to bring one system down, and then bring one up, you would be reluctant to reboot.
in a server, if you can it up for 5 weeks, and you find a security hole being exploited and your patch requires a reboot immediately,wouldn't you like it to take as little time as possible to keep your network up? sometimes a 1 minute downtime is ok and 5 minutes is a serious problem.
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oh, and serel does not seem to be mature enough for general use, i have read in other forums about problems getting it to run and have had many issues myself. on the other hand, if their were an ebuild  im sure the gentoo crew would have any issues tapped out very quickly. |
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Ulukay
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 08 Oct 2002
Posts: 143
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| Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2003 10:42 am Post subject: |
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you could start everything per INETD
(samba, ftp, telnet, ssh, http)
so you have only one service started when you are booting |
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ghetto
Guru
Joined: 10 Jul 2002
Posts: 369
Location: BC, Canada
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| Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2003 10:35 pm Post subject: |
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i dont really need to worry i dont have many servers start at boot.. or at least thats what i thought till i took a look at it..
for a default installation you pretty much need:
eth0
metalog
portmap
vcron
xdm
and other than that, I also use(takes one second or less to start each):
apache
mysql
sometimes i manually start up:
sshd
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cbolin
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 08 Feb 2003
Posts: 147
Location: Portland, Oregon
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 12:14 am Post subject: failed to bring up eth0 |
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I enabled RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="yes" in my rc file and now when I reboot I get a Failed to bring up eth0.
Don't do that if it hurts logic applies - but my system did seem to start up faster.
Any ideas around this issue? |
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syadnom
Guru
Joined: 09 May 2002
Posts: 531
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 9:38 pm Post subject: try this |
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rc-update del net.eth0 default
rc-update add net.eth0 boot |
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gilesjuk
Guru
Joined: 11 Feb 2003
Posts: 412
Location: Staffordshire, UK
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 10:16 pm Post subject: Re: boot even faster (silly idea?) |
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| f.kater wrote: | Hi,
Couldn't we compile everything what is necessary as a basis to use gnome or kde into one big piece of code which is loaded in the same way the kernel is loaded (just one big block)?
Maybe this sounds completely silly to the programmers point of view - but if it was possible then gentoo would probably the first who could do it since its advantage is to be able to compile everything from scratch.
|
No, it would be second to AmigaOS. There was an app that would dump the current memory to a big file which would be copied into RAM at bootup. Of course AmigaOS had no mem protection so such things could be done easily and it also didn't have a disk based tmp folder.
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cbolin
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 08 Feb 2003
Posts: 147
Location: Portland, Oregon
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| Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2003 11:22 pm Post subject: Re: try this |
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| syadnom wrote: | rc-update del net.eth0 default
rc-update add net.eth0 boot |
Thanks for your quick reply.
However the problem still occurs... failed to load eth0. If I remove the parallel startup option, all is well. argh! |
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syadnom
Guru
Joined: 09 May 2002
Posts: 531
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| Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 2:57 am Post subject: ok |
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is your network card a module? or compiled in kernel? make sure its in kernel, maybee your net card isn't loaded yet.
also, check any rc-scripts that have anything to do with networking and make sure they have "depend net.eth0", then nothing should try to load that needs net.eth0 until it is loaded, you may be just missing that dependancy. |
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regeya
Apprentice
Joined: 28 Jul 2002
Posts: 270
Location: Desoto, IL, USA
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| Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 2:14 am Post subject: |
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| ebrostig wrote: | Excuse me for asking, but why on earth is it important if the system boots in 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds? Unless you are constantly rebooting your machine, I couldn't care less if it even took 5 minutes to boot!
I only reboot my machines after upgrading the kernel and frankly I can wait whatever time it takes.
There are quite a few other areas where I would like to see more effort put into it. One of them is X-windows optimizing.
IMHO putting effort into getting the system to boot faster, is a waste of resources if you ask me.
Erik |
I'm sorry to bring it up again 6 months after the fact, but I'm so freaking sick of reading this sort of response. Some of us want the boot time to be faster. Why? Not all of us go for the "who's-longer" (uptimes, boys, chill) contests, and actually shut down our computers when we're done. Heck, here in the Midwest U.S. where we really do have bad weather, it's nice to be able to start up and shut down in a hurry. I don't stop at shutting down--oh no. I also unplug my machine. And if you've put off some important piece of work, nothing raises the blood pressure more than sitting and watching "Setting user font..." for seconds on end. I've seen XP machines start up fast. I've got a five year old G4 on my desk at work, and it starts up faster than my Gentoo machine here at home. It's embarrassing. I realize that the last may not seem terribly practical, but the horribly inefficient nature of Gentoo's current startup scripts is irritating.
Every time I'm under pressure to get something done, and my computer has been unplugged, I get irritated. Every time I get dragged out of bed by a popup severe storm and am trying to shut down the computer in a hurry, I think to myself, "Shit goddamn, the computer's going to ride the lightning before the goddamn shutdown scripts ever finish." I realize I could set up hardware or hardware suspend, but setting up suspend just because people are too lazy to speed up the boot/shutdown process is ridiculous.
I hope this begins to spell it out for you l33t d00dz who have to pitch in with your "who cares how long it takes to boot up" every time the discussion starts.  And sorry for the excessive boldface.
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doubleagent
Guru
Joined: 15 Apr 2005
Posts: 444
Location: 127.0.0.1
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| Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 2:41 am Post subject: |
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| regeya wrote: | | ebrostig wrote: | Excuse me for asking, but why on earth is it important if the system boots in 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds? Unless you are constantly rebooting your machine, I couldn't care less if it even took 5 minutes to boot!
I only reboot my machines after upgrading the kernel and frankly I can wait whatever time it takes.
There are quite a few other areas where I would like to see more effort put into it. One of them is X-windows optimizing.
IMHO putting effort into getting the system to boot faster, is a waste of resources if you ask me.
Erik |
I'm sorry to bring it up again 6 months after the fact, but I'm so freaking sick of reading this sort of response. Some of us want the boot time to be faster. Why? Not all of us go for the "who's-longer" (uptimes, boys, chill) contests, and actually shut down our computers when we're done. Heck, here in the Midwest U.S. where we really do have bad weather, it's nice to be able to start up and shut down in a hurry. I don't stop at shutting down--oh no. I also unplug my machine. And if you've put off some important piece of work, nothing raises the blood pressure more than sitting and watching "Setting user font..." for seconds on end. I've seen XP machines start up fast. I've got a five year old G4 on my desk at work, and it starts up faster than my Gentoo machine here at home. It's embarrassing. I realize that the last may not seem terribly practical, but the horribly inefficient nature of Gentoo's current startup scripts is irritating.
Every time I'm under pressure to get something done, and my computer has been unplugged, I get irritated. Every time I get dragged out of bed by a popup severe storm and am trying to shut down the computer in a hurry, I think to myself, "Shit goddamn, the computer's going to ride the lightning before the goddamn shutdown scripts ever finish." I realize I could set up hardware or hardware suspend, but setting up suspend just because people are too lazy to speed up the boot/shutdown process is ridiculous.
I hope this begins to spell it out for you l33t d00dz who have to pitch in with your "who cares how long it takes to boot up" every time the discussion starts. And sorry for the excessive boldface. |
Wow. Well you're not a bore I'll give you that!
I don't understand. My Gentoo boots up just as fast as my Windows XP (on very rare occasions the eth0 script will take longer) and shuts down even faster. Maybe I'm in a minority....
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syadnom
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Joined: 09 May 2002
Posts: 531
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| Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 4:34 am Post subject: wow, old thread, im in !!! |
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the truth is, the whole init system needs re-worked.
sysV is old and slow, gentoo init is slow!, all unixy init systems are slow except apple's.
their is absolutely NO reason that an init system can't be built for gentoo to boot quickly!
some SIMPLE dependancy checking and "task periods" for boot up could be implemented easily.
first, get rid of runlevels or ignore them.
now, every startup task's script simple has a 'wait for dependancy X, Y, Z if on startup list" then run.
so samba needs networking and cups, but cups is not being started up so is not in the init script, so
check /etc/init/running for network up
wait for init.network
(now wait for network to add 'up' to /etc/init/running)
network says 'up'
(GO, GOGOGO GO! NOW!)
/etc/init/samba start & if 'success' add 'up' /etc/init/running if fail add 'fail' to /etc/init/running && (start immediatly now, dont wait for anything else and fork into background)
now nfs needs to start.
check init
ok, network up,
run startup script
sucess! tell init im up, and dont wait for anything else, run now and fork into background
!!simple!! what is wrong with this?
it needs to be written in a more system savy way, but this illustrates the point.
let's get this old thread back in gear |
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