Gentoo taking shamefully long to boot.

[Asch]

So, while customizing my fabulous gentoo box, I never gave much attention to the boot process. Now I realized that It is taking shameful 50 seconds to boot. It is bad, compared to windows 7, which takes about 30 seconds. I understand that some of you may think of it as futile, but it is really for me a matter of honor: I want my system to be better than those of those damn lammers in every aspect, not just mem consumption, eyecandy, battery life, and overall performance: boot time is crucial for it to look like having superior performance, and in PR appearance is key.

So, the scenario is the following:

• I have a fully monolithic kernel, compressed with the LZMA method. Would a modular kernel boot faster?
  
• I'm using e4rat: I'm using only two partitions: one 5GB swap and the other is a ext4, using the remaining of the HDD
  
• I'm using also readahead-list, emerged from the gentoo tree, with default configuration. Does it make critical difference? Would it make much of a difference if I tweak it thoroughly like suggested by the painfully outdated gentoo-wiki?
  
• I have dracut at hand, but I believe it actually makes booting longer, but I could try using it with the minimal modules necessary to see if that works.

So, that's all. I hope you can be of help to me, even though OTW seems to be a somewhat shoddy place.[/list]
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Contributing to dumbassification of Gentoo forums since 2011.

[Dr.Willy]

Shouldn't you look into removing unneccessary programs from boot and parallelizing those that remain?

[Boris27]

Cheat. Windows only starts certain things after login, or did you include that in your 30 second estimate?

Certain services can easily be deferred till after boot.
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we are microsoft, lower your firewalls and surrender your pc's. we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. your culture will adapt and service us. resistance is futile.

[ichbinsisyphos]

Doesn't readaheadlist preload programs during boot so that they load faster once they are needed? If anything that would increase boot time. Anyways, all of the tricks combined I've tried long time ago didn't manage to bring down boot time by a measurable amount. What did reduce it was a different init (with openrc the standard should be perfect now), parallelizing, removing unnecessary boot services and kernel options.

No, I don't think that a modular kernel would be faster, that would really surprise me.[/list]


edit: http://ompldr.org/vZGRuNA/bootchart.png 19 seconds

[Prenj]

windows cheats. after you log in, it still loads stuff for at least a minute.

[BoneKracker]

[BoneKracker]

[mcgruff]

[pjp]

Moved from Off the Wall to Other Things Gentoo.
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lolgov. 'cause where we're going, you don't have civil liberties.

In Loving Memory
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[PaulBredbury]

Maybe e4rat will help.

[ichbinsisyphos]

[BoneKracker]

[avx]

50s starting at what point? Power on, bootloader, kernel, init?

My notebook takes <20s from the push of the powerbutton to login(non-graphical), activating swap alone somehow takes ~3s - gotta find a way to delay that properly.

That's on a rather slow SSD without tools like readahead or e4rat, just openrc running in parallel - but I admit, there aren't much service loaded by default.
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[Etal]

Nobody mentioned systemd yet!
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“And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”– Hillary Clinton, Jan. 21, 2010

[avx]

[Ant P.]

It'd help to see the output of bootchart...

[broken_chaos]

[ak47gen]

[lyallp]

What I do is look at what is scheduled to start in my default runlevel.
I then decide what is unnecessary at login, such as apache, mysql, etc. I update the /etc/init.d/{script} to have an 'after xdm' dependency.
See if this helps.
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...Lyall