Speed up boot!

xkjyeah · n00b Joined: 10 May 2003 Posts: 72

I shut down my computer often (and don't discourage me on that). Give me ideas on how to boot Gentoo as fast as possible.

My own suggestions:

- Loading modules seem quite long. I think it is because of "modules-update" and awking the whole modules file. If we cached results of the awk, and skipped modules-update, it should be faster (haven't tried).

However, without modules-update, forgetful people (like me) will forget to do so. But it wouldn't be required often, am I right?

- DHCP requests can take a few seconds, especially with certain NICs --> ifplugd.

- ALSA -- see modules.

- Tried hotplug b4, but not now. "/sbin/hotplug &" (see my comment below)?

Lastly, is it possible to offload Scanning of font directories (for XFS), modules-update (which would ideally cache ALSA and modules.autoload) to runtime? Perhaps in cron? The slow startup can also be attributed to all the BASH activities (source -ing). Anything to speed that up?

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WinXP boots 1.5 times as fast as by Gentoo, the main reason for this post. I do not want to cheat by making bash "fork" using "&". I want the error messages, if any.

paulisdead · Guru Joined: 10 Apr 2002 Posts: 510 Location: Seattle, WA

Make sure you've got this line in /etc/conf.d/rc

ett_gramse_nap · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2004 6:18 am Post subject:

What are the differences between 'boot' and 'default'? Are 'boot' just earlier?
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Evil Dark Archon · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2004 6:27 am Post subject:

in a word, yes, the boot also gets special treatment by rc-update, basically it will warn you before removing anything from the boot runlevel.
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ett_gramse_nap · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2004 9:07 am Post subject:

grzewho · l33t Joined: 31 Dec 2002 Posts: 626 Location: /home/g

I`ve commented out the modules-update line in /etc/init.d/modules, and run it manually when I upgrade my kernel or change something with my modules config. Don`t know if its a proper fix, but it speeds up my boot.

ett_gramse_nap · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2004 7:13 pm Post subject:

grzewho · l33t Joined: 31 Dec 2002 Posts: 626 Location: /home/g

as I wrote above, I run modules-update only when upgrading the kernel or modifying modules configuration. I don`t see the point to run it every boot
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Spawn of Lovechild · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004 1:07 pm Post subject:

Robert M. Love's blog (http://primates.ximian.com/~rml/blog/) included the following snippet yesterday.

markfl · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004 1:33 pm Post subject:

Linux boots damn fast on my machine, i havent timed it but i can boot an unoptimised XP in 20 seconds
I'm gonna try a couple of the tweaks here when i get home
markfl
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xkjyeah · n00b Joined: 10 May 2003 Posts: 72

The boot time sux. Everytime I want to boot the computer to surf the net, I have to decide between 10+seconds of waiting (WinXP) and 30+seconds (you-know-what).

And last of all, KDE takes quite some time to start (from login screen to 100%), haven't timed, but
definitely around 5 seconds slower.

Is is because the structure of the Gentoo booting system is just plain slow? It is like bash, bash and more bash, init scripts under runscripts.sh under bash and more bash??!!

zerojay · Veteran Joined: 09 Aug 2003 Posts: 1033

Honestly, is your time so precious that you can't handle waiting 30 seconds to boot up a machine?

neenee · Veteran Joined: 20 Jul 2003 Posts: 1786

for laptops and finishing something quickly,
30 seconds is a quite long wait.

sebest · Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2004 3:38 pm Post subject:

log · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 3:11 am Post subject:

I used to have an Athlon 1.3Ghz and it booted way quick.

I got rid of that and upgraded to a P4 3Ghz (laptop) and now it takes longer to boot the kernel (nottalking about services yet). The services take about the same amount of time to boot as well.

Ill be upgrading to the 2.6 kernel soon to see if it makes a diff..

cheers

sebest · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 10:40 am Post subject:

Anyway if you want a really fast shutdown and startup you could use suspend to ram.:
http://swsusp.sourceforge.net/

you start exactly where you left. it's the same functionaly as "hibernate" in windows.
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RaaR · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Jul 2003 Posts: 125

sebest · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 4:05 pm Post subject:

yes but you can't unplug your computer in suspend to ram,
suspend to swap (or to disk, it's the same) allow you to keep you data when you battery are empty.
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sindre · Guru Joined: 01 Nov 2002 Posts: 315 Location: Norway

Faster booting isn't gonna hurt anyone (and it looks nice when comparing to other OSes).

Boris27 · Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 8:40 pm Post subject:

pranyi · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 12:27 am Post subject:

A had made some experiment with stopwatch.

I have parallel booting enabled, and eliminated modules-update from my init.d/modules.

Now, my box (Athlon 2000+, with 512 Mb RAM, 7200 RPM HDD), boots for 40 secs: it takes about 25-30 sec until X starts, then about 10 secs until the login window comes. After logging in, I have to wait for about 10 additional secs for KDE to start up. Interestingly, the first 5-7 secs of the booting is spent in checking the BIOS.

Window XP boots in 15 seconds until the login window and after logging in, one can start working almost instanteously.

So booting with WinXP is between 2x-3x faster then with Linux after tweaking...

_Nomad_ · Guru Joined: 11 Apr 2003 Posts: 571

pranyi · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 12:41 am Post subject:

int2str · Guru Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 362

FWIW, my Athlon 2400+ on my laptop boots about like this:

- 5-6 seconds to grub (compaq screen...)
- ~30 seconds kernel+init (Without X, I would be able to login at this point)
- ~20 seconds for X+kdm to load
- ~25 seconds after login, KDE is 100% done and ready

So it takes me about 1min 20secs to boot and log in.

And no SWSUSP completely doesn't work on my machine...

I'm pretty sad about this actually.

Can't compare to XP since I dont dual boot.
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gmichels · Guru Joined: 20 Jun 2003 Posts: 480 Location: Brazil