[HOWTO] Flying with gentoo

FastTurtle · Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 1:55 am Post subject: My How-To Speed Bootup

I had the same problem that many complain about. Boot took over 2m20s to complete and after extensive reading, I finally found a solution that requires no editing of scripts, just simple changes to rc-update an a single kernel config change.

The change I made to rc-update was to remove netmount and that saved 1+min of time by itself. The other change was to change the kernel config and convert automount to a module and load it into modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.x.. Between these to changes, I was able to improve my boot speed from lilo prompt to log-in to less then 30 seconds.

It really doesn't take much to improve Gentoos boot speed significantly. The 1st thing to always examine is what services are starting and to disable those that you don't need. This is also the beginning of securing your system. Don't start services unless really need them. In fact I would like to see netmount being removed from rc-update and all services that aren't explictly needed to boot disabled by default. If you need them, then you add them in as the OpenBSD folks believe.

System Config: Stage1 using 2005.0 live cd No ntpl
XP1800; 1024 mem 60 gig WD /home 15.3 Seagate / and remainder
cflag -march -O1 -pipe
_________________
AsRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4
128GB 3200 Mhz memory
4x 4TB Sata - 2x 2TB Sata SSD - 4x 450GB SaS - 3x 900GB SaS - 72GB SaS for Boot
LSI 9211-8i in HBA mode for all of the SaS drives
Radeon 6800 (Non XT) for GPU

Bitspyer · Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 1:59 pm Post subject:

Does anyone tried init-ng? If this works like they say, it should boost up the boot process.

I've tried it, but it hangs, when my network comes up. :roll:

_________________
Der Weg zur Dunklen Seite... Schneller er ist, verführerischer, leichter.

Varg_ · Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2005 6:12 am Post subject:

I've installed and tried it with my gentoo64, It more than halved my boot time to around 17 seconds or so.

But it is broken with nvidia drivers, and there are apparently some network issues; its encouraged for you write or edit your own init scripts to get things like network working properly however - the standard sysV init scripts are incompatible with initng
_________________
Tautological Defenestration

hellspawn · n00b Joined: 15 Jun 2005 Posts: 22

Anyone got an operation not permited when tryng to set dma?
I got this and i wonder how to get around it.

Plazmic · n00b Joined: 18 Feb 2005 Posts: 34 Location: Florida

Excellent guide! In someways a bit too agressive for my liking but nonetheless very helpful

InitNG had my system booting in under 15 seconds... that said it is still an alpha build. Eventually it will completely deprecate sysvinit (in my opinion) but I would recommend not using it for production enviroments much less if you don't know exactly what your doing. Theres alot of configuration incompatabilities as previously stated.

Also in:

lnxz · Guru Joined: 03 Jul 2005 Posts: 472 Location: Earth

Well, as I understand the gcc info page on gcc optimizations -fomit-frame-pointer makes gcc not keep the frame pointer in a register for functions that don't need one, it doesn't disable keeping frame pointers for all functions.
I think leaf frame pointers are different from regular frame pointers, but I'm not sure, though.

asph · Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 6:14 pm Post subject:

i am planning a major update (re-write) of the guide in order to update it, i would like to ask for a little collaboration to make it wider and add more tweaks for the system.. it will take me a while because I want to do it right and extense, if you think you can add something or want some feature to be commented please feel free to p.m. me

_________________
gentoo sex is updatedb; locate; talk; date; cd; strip; look; touch; finger; unzip; uptime; gawk; head; emerge --oneshot condom; mount; fsck; gasp; more; yes; yes; yes; more; umount; emerge -C condom; make clean; sleep

Enlight · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 3:32 pm Post subject:

TGL · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 4:37 pm Post subject:

user118696 · Apprentice Joined: 16 Sep 2005 Posts: 276

Interesting. Thx.

karmarcoma · n00b Joined: 16 Dec 2004 Posts: 2 Location: Germany

what about this:

/etc/init.d/xdm
find the line which reads

TGL

Gotterdammerung · Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 11:41 pm Post subject:

really cool! I'm trying some of these tips right now.
_________________
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

From what I understand, it is preferred to use the glibc-omitfp use flag over the -fomit-leaf-frame-pointer CFLAG. It is less likely to break things. It allows glibc to decide when to omit frame pointers.
_________________
Nihilism makes me smile.

shadowscythe · n00b Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 1

crys0000 · n00b Joined: 11 Jan 2006 Posts: 44 Location: Todi, Italy

I don't have any /etc/init.d/service file in my system...

ZiffyWombat · Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 12:13 pm Post subject:

I would recommend compiling all of your boot programs with the

asph · Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 7:30 am Post subject:

added performance tips for kernel 2.6 and for kde users (thanks xdarma for the links)
_________________
gentoo sex is updatedb; locate; talk; date; cd; strip; look; touch; finger; unzip; uptime; gawk; head; emerge --oneshot condom; mount; fsck; gasp; more; yes; yes; yes; more; umount; emerge -C condom; make clean; sleep

yoshi314 · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 850 Location: PL

using a separate partition for portage workdir (compilation directory and ccache dir) makes such a big difference. [sounds obvious, heh].

i also noticed that it was a bad idea to try reiser4 with that partition - that fs put some stress on cpu on compilation, and interfered with compilation a bit (most noticeable with packages that have thousands of source files to compile). ext3 with dir_index tweak did much better job.

i don't want to state the obvious, but it also reduces the mess in your root partition. and that really shows, after a couple of dozens of merged packages.
_________________
~amd64
shrink your /usr/portage with squashfs+aufs

mostro · n00b Joined: 20 May 2005 Posts: 26

Here is a small, but important detail about the code given to determine if modules-update should be executed or not.

If you only look at the mtime of the /etc/modules.d directory, you will be missing potential changes to the actual files within the directory. So a better alternative is:

for File in /etc/modules.d/*; do
if [ "$File" -nt /etc/modprobe.conf ]; then
# modules-update code goes here.
# ...
break
fi
done

The reason for the "break" is that once modules-update runs, there is no point in continuing to check the other files... I hope this helps someone out there.

ygor · n00b Joined: 28 Oct 2006 Posts: 2

I liked a lot, congratulations for the good work.

Can you give a word about init-ng????

Also do you know any hdparm like application that currently works with the latest SATA drivers???

Thanks,

Ygor Lemos

ebfe · n00b Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 20

most of the general tips and like all of the cflags in the first post won't lead to any performance gain, are incorrectly discribed and in general just bogus. you may also add -fflux-capacitor or -frearrange-dilithium-core

btw take a look at some ebuilds and you'll see that some of the most popular packages filter cflags.

cfriedt · Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2007 10:35 am Post subject: Re: [HOWTO] Flying with gentoo

monsm · Guru Joined: 26 Sep 2007 Posts: 467 Location: London, UK

Hi,
This looks like some very good advice. It is now just past its 3 year birthday since it was originally posted and a year since the last edit.

I guess this is still reasonably relevant?

Shouldn't this be on the wiki instead? or is it already there somehwere?