Startup / boot time

int2str · Guru Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 362

Hey guys!

I run Gentoo no my Compaq Presario 2100 notebook. It has a Athlon 2400+ with 512kb L2 cache and 512mb of ram. The hard drive is a generic (read slow) notebook hd.

Current setup:
- Gentoo 1.4
- Kernel 2.6.1
- KDE 3.2 rc1

Now, since suspend/resume doesn't work on that machine, is there any way I can speed up booting?

I checked with a stopwatch - it takes 1:30min from power-on until KDE ready (logged in and all - took me 13 secs to log in). That isn't too bad I guess, but still annoying.

What I did so far:
- only 1 module (radeon) everything else in the kernel (bare minimum)
- "parallel init" flag set /etc/conf.d/rc
- ifplugd to start networking later (when the machine is already booted up)
- tweaked hdparm to be as good as it gets (I think) on that notebook
- /tmp is using tmpfs

Now I know the notebook is not the fastest, period. But are there any more things I could do?

The keep hold up seems to be the init phase - even so I have no unecessary services start up.

Cheers,
Andre

teknomage1 · Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 7:44 pm Post subject:

I'm a big kde fan but you might consider dropping that. On my desktop I use kde but on my laptop I use black box and that has really sped up my boot time. Of course your laptop has better stats than my desktop so your mileage may very....

int2str · Guru Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 362

Well, for me KDE isn't really the problem. I'll hold the stopwatch at it again later tonight, but I feel that the pre-X part takes more time than it should, not so much the X/KDE part (though if that can be made faster as well, lemme know

).

Cheers,
André

charlieg · Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2004 2:16 am Post subject:

ewan.paton · Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2004 3:48 am Post subject:

thats pretty slow for a pretty hefty spec machine, i dont restart my laptop that often but its seems faster than that [1] what services are you running on boot. also are you sure hdparm has dma enabled, you could also consider a ramdisk and copying a bunch of progs to it on load so they start faster, its doubtfull you need that much ram for actual progs.

[1] its a 850mhz dell
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int2str · Guru Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 362

Thanks for your replies, guys!

Starting xdm (kdm) earlier seems like a good idea. But I looked through the init script and it makes a point about xdm needing to be started after the getty's... So I don't think that will work.

Yes, DMA is enabled. The hard drive is as good as it gets (I think). Here's the output for hdparm /dev/hda:

charlieg · Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2004 11:20 am Post subject:

Looking at the above, xdm can be started before:

consolefont
net.lo
netmount
pcmcia
vcron

And probably a couple of others.
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markfl · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 1:43 pm Post subject:

how do you change the order in which services start then?

markfl
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Gelfling · Posted: Sat May 08, 2004 10:03 pm Post subject:

On my system, I'm using hdparm -d1 -c3 -u1 -m16 -a64 -A1 /dev/hde & /dev/hdg since it doesn't work if I apply hdparm to /dev/md0 and here's my results:

hdparm -tT /dev/md0

/dev/md0:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.18 seconds =703.40 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 0.52 seconds =123.10 MB/sec
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