Comments on: Making Ubuntu boot in 19 seconds

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Plunk — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:26:00 +0000

Good Job LC. Now, get your ass to the Linux SIG and you can do a demonstration based on this We need more people to come and present. I’ll even give you that 10 bucks I owe ya.

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Alex Lu — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 23:49:00 +0000

Hmm. my macbook gets to the desktop from the time i press the power button in 20-22 secs. Is there any way to make it faster? (I have the 2 GHz Core 2 Duo one)

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zaphu — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:18:00 +0000

I’m running Ubuntu 7.04 on a 400 Mhz Pentium Celeron with 64 Mb of RAM. It boot in less than 5 minutes most days. I am running a LAMP serve on this beast too. I can server a few tens of pages a minute indefinitely.

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The Amigo — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 20:36:00 +0000

Removing initrd will save even more time. The only reason it’s needed on some systems is for loading modules that are needed to access to rootfs (scsi drivers, raid, etc).

Just compile those modules into the kernel and you don’t need an initrd at all.

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Shaumux — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:49:00 +0000

My system boots up in 16 seconds using eINIT on an 6 month old gentoo installation.

The PC is around 4 years old with pentium 4 1.8 GHz and Seagate 40 GB ST340015A 5200rpm hdd and 768 MB ram.

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mgarces — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:43:00 +0000

Have you heard about initNG? Maybe it will speed up even more your machine =)

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Justin — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:34:00 +0000

Also note that by default bootchart stops when your xdm sleeps. This means you’re comparing time to gdm to time to finished login. There’s likely more silly things done during login that cause slowdown.

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Justin — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:30:00 +0000

By far, the most dramatic increases in performance left are I/O related. If you look at your boot chart, you’ll notice that disk utilization is high, but through peaks only very shortly, averaging only 2MB/second. Boot chart creates a list of files to be read, but they’re not at all close to one another on disk, so a lot of time will be wasted seeking. Finding some way to make that read linear will dramatically boost boot times.

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Caleb — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 16:43:00 +0000

19 seconds from boot menu to login prompt in my LFS virtual machine. 10 seconds for the kernel, 9 seconds for loading drivers and configuring the system during init. This image is over 2 years old now. Starting X with a desktop would take a few more seconds, but unfortunately this version of X lacks drivers and I’ve been too lazy to compile them, besides, it would be faster if it were running on the metal. 30 seconds sounds reasonable, but 20 should be possible.

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mlambie — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 16:39:00 +0000

So the total savings was only 7 seconds then? Seems like too much work in my book, but on older hardware that’s more important I guess. Almost a 15% increase.