tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post7299409368874567638..comments2024-03-13T16:34:48.089+01:00Comments on Frederic Crozat blog: Improving boot time on a general Linux distribution, not an easy taskFredhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11945939947279163927noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-62649092552088300872009-02-06T07:36:00.000+01:002009-02-06T07:36:00.000+01:00jms: partially ; we already looked at some of mobl...jms: partially ; we already looked at some of moblin ideas and we were already doing similar things on our OEM products. However, moblin is designed for a specific target and some of their technical choices can't be used for generic distro. Anyway, we've just pushed first phase of speedboot on Cooker yesterday, which improves boot time speed a lot.Fredhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05183076812550842311noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-80573551735046509932009-01-28T18:19:00.000+01:002009-01-28T18:19:00.000+01:00Can the moblin project have any impact on mandriva...Can the moblin project have any impact on mandriva boot time?<BR/>this impressive even with Xfce<BR/>http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_moblin_2&num=1Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01598310727485392195noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-74425893878624920732008-10-05T14:01:00.000+02:002008-10-05T14:01:00.000+02:00Andrew: coreboot (ex-linuxbios) can jump to the li...Andrew: coreboot (ex-linuxbios) can jump to the linux kernel very very fast, i.e. quasi instantly, so you'll save a lot of time on legacy BIOS, but (and it's a big but) still too few motherboards are supported, and a new port is not trivial.<BR/><BR/>have a look at : http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_MotherboardsVincehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06747270395146070788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-71225543091041321882008-10-04T10:26:00.000+02:002008-10-04T10:26:00.000+02:00Klemensas : hmm, did you check the 3rd link in thi...Klemensas : hmm, did you check the 3rd link in this blog post ?Fredhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05183076812550842311noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-7008416935584832172008-10-03T13:56:00.000+02:002008-10-03T13:56:00.000+02:00have you seen this?http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/...have you seen this?<BR/>http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/Klemensashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13396073228686509893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-26052843975901615452008-10-02T21:54:00.000+02:002008-10-02T21:54:00.000+02:00Gary: prelink is only saving some CPU cycles when ...Gary: prelink is only saving some CPU cycles when starting applications. We just did some quick tests on an "underpowered" system (EEE PC 701) and using prelink didn't reduce boot time but X seems to have started 1s earlier. No visible change in GNOME startup. Anyway, we'll investigate prelink during Mandriva 2009.1 development cycle.<BR/><BR/>Slux: how about testing Mandriva 2009 when it is released next week so you can see if you did a good job ?<BR/><BR/>Andrew : this blog post is focusing on Linux distro boot time optimization, so I'd prefer to stay on focus.Fredhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05183076812550842311noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-29951141295982756522008-10-02T10:05:00.000+02:002008-10-02T10:05:00.000+02:00In attempts to reduce the total boot times (althou...In attempts to reduce the total boot times (although this is out of scope for the work on the distribution per se) I would be interested to hear people's experiences of using different BIOS to boot faster, such as OpenBIOS etc.<BR/><BR/>Is there a site where you can see if the (new, open, faster) BIOS was successfully run on the device you own?<BR/><BR/>thanks for informationAndrew Mackenziehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07645765944113681730noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-32145303361771872812008-10-02T00:42:00.000+02:002008-10-02T00:42:00.000+02:00Please don't do anything XP does. Sure, it gets fa...Please don't do anything XP does. Sure, it gets fast to the desktop but is totally bogged fro a long time after that which is super-annoying when it would seem you could start using it but can't.sluxhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06953137484949641225noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-70294332040193295672008-10-01T09:57:00.000+02:002008-10-01T09:57:00.000+02:00Please install the package "prelink", which can im...Please install the package "prelink", which can improve start time of files formatted as ELF, by default.<BR/><BR/>The kernel option "quiet" can suppress messages from kernel, maybe saving time to show information.garyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09518569468287264724noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-36761176795804244772008-10-01T08:56:00.000+02:002008-10-01T08:56:00.000+02:00Klemensas : you mean hibernation image, not suspen...Klemensas : you mean hibernation image, not suspend, I guess. Well, that would require hibernate to work reliably, which is still not the case unfortunately (mostly because of Xorg but there are a lot of devices which aren't yet fixed properly in kernel). Moreover, it would slow shutdown (unless you want to start with the same hibernation image every time). And from looking at various bootchart, starting kernel itself is not the bottleneck.Fredhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05183076812550842311noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-90327171475700120672008-10-01T08:33:00.000+02:002008-10-01T08:33:00.000+02:00What about loading suspended to disk kernel image ...What about loading suspended to disk kernel image (or maybe even daemons, X) - this would be as fast as hdd permit.Klemensashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13396073228686509893noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-86729609606126217302008-09-30T23:16:00.000+02:002008-09-30T23:16:00.000+02:00Ademar: thanks for the detailed explanations. I gu...Ademar: thanks for the detailed explanations. I guess now is a good time to ping Bedhad again ;)Fredhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05183076812550842311noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-24320588127076754912008-09-30T23:09:00.000+02:002008-09-30T23:09:00.000+02:00Fred: the problem with readahead_later is that you...Fred: the problem with readahead_later is that you don't know which program the user uses most. The idea of my patch is quite simple, but it's not about the boot time, but about application startup instead:<BR/><BR/>- preload is good at predicting what program the user runs more frequently;<BR/><BR/>- preload kind of sux when predicting which files are used by a program, as the file mappings from /proc are only the files open at some point in time (programs usually open/close lots of files during startup and preload doesn't include them).<BR/><BR/>My patch solves the second problem:<BR/> - You (the distro vendor) create a list of files opened by several programs during their startups (using strace, there's a python script there);<BR/> - Whenever preload decides it should preload a particular program (let's say, firefox-bin, oowriter-bin, kdeinit4, etc), you load not just this particular file, but all the files from the filelist associated to this program (falling back to standard behavior if there's no filelist associated).<BR/><BR/>It's quite simple and works flawlessly, with optmial results. But it's a hack, of PoC quality. Too bad I didn't have time to work more on this and Behdad was not giving attention to preload by that time, so the idea went to /dev/null.Ademarhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06886168405951892875noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-83142855669318932792008-09-30T22:00:00.000+02:002008-09-30T22:00:00.000+02:00For folks unable to see the LWN link here's a link...For folks unable to see the LWN link here's a link to Arjan's slides in PowerPoint format - http://www.fenrus.org/plumbers_fastboot.ppt .Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01922368688020328561noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-58998601543545429532008-09-30T21:50:00.000+02:002008-09-30T21:50:00.000+02:00Pacho: no, I haven't. Could you try generating boo...Pacho: no, I haven't. Could you try generating bootchart with "quiet" set and not set in order to get some data to compare ?<BR/><BR/>Anders: well, we don't run that many services which are cpu intensive and slowing the boot by default. Moreover, anacron are configured to not start its remaining job immediatly after boot. For modprobe, it is called directly by udev coldplug, using modules aliases, so replacing with insmod is not really an option (and we would loose potential options set in modprobe.conf(.d)). preload memory usage is quite low and it won't start on low memory system.<BR/><BR/>Alan : you should upgrade to latest cooker and mail to cooker mailing list if you still have issues.<BR/><BR/>Ademar : for preconfigured devices, it might be better to use readahead_later, rather than patching preload. <BR/><BR/>Evi1M4chine : I'm glad your system is already optimized. However, I don't know how long you spent doing so and many users don't want (nor have the knownledge) to do such optimization. A bootchart of your system would still be interesting ;)Fredhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05183076812550842311noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-41240711161615039542008-09-30T21:34:00.000+02:002008-09-30T21:34:00.000+02:00Strangely, nearly everything you mention is non-ex...Strangely, nearly everything you mention is non-existant here. I do not have loads of autodetect mechanisms left and right because i know my system (like everyone who tunes his boot should) and configured everything hard/monolithic, except for parts that may be missing (like usb-devices or disks).<BR/><BR/>I also already had parallel booting and X starting early in Gentoo by default, trough intelligent boot service dependency resolution.<BR/><BR/>So I could not reduce my boot time by even one second. The slowest parts here are the bios, and services that I need absolutely.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-75743271970061273622008-09-30T18:53:00.000+02:002008-09-30T18:53:00.000+02:00It may be worth to re-consider a idea I had back i...It may be worth to re-consider a idea I had back in april of this year (while working for Mandriva, BTW):<BR/><BR/>Add support of static file-lists to preload.<BR/><BR/>The patch I sent to the ml was just a proof-of-concept, but it worked and the results were quite good, specially for small devices with a pre-configured environment and for cases of big subsystems such as kde, gnome or openoffice.<BR/><BR/>http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=preload-devel&max_rows=25&style=ultimate&viewmonth=200804Ademarhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06886168405951892875noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-31970320130151789622008-09-30T18:05:00.000+02:002008-09-30T18:05:00.000+02:00Hi Frederic,I've been running Mandriva since 2009 ...Hi Frederic,<BR/><BR/>I've been running Mandriva since 2009 beta2. I'm really impressed with the distro. Though I noticed in either yesterday or today's sync my boot became significantly slower. I switched to terminal and saw it was after mounting the root and it was waiting for loading init or something similar (sorry I don't remember the exact message) and had a bunch of ....s.<BR/><BR/>If you'd like me to run through some tests for this to help track it down I'm more than happy to assist. Feel free to mail me skyphyr using email from gmail. Sorry for the bot avoiding wording of my mail addy.<BR/><BR/>Cheers,<BR/><BR/>Alan.Alan Joneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00304074759199533605noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-28938477200523293932008-09-30T11:24:00.000+02:002008-09-30T11:24:00.000+02:00I dont have any figures on how much I gained from ...I dont have any figures on how much I gained from tuning some services to start later, but it was noticable and very easy to do, I had some daemons loading a fair bit of disk data during start however, so my results might be a bit off. I dont know how many non important daemons you start on a stock mandriva system.<BR/><BR/>Regarding usb pens for preloading, this can produce very good improvements in theory, as there's no seek overhead one can load small files EXTREMELY fast. However this something I'd bother putting on a default setup, as very few people would use it.<BR/><BR/>Also I looked into the readahead daemons you mentioned a while back, and decided not to use it, some people reported problems running applications with it active, and that it's memory usage was severe. I wrote my own a while ago that I still haven't gotten around to using, kernel auditing to monitor file access. The theory was that my readahead daemon would run and keep ahead of needed file access. I also wouldn't want preloading after I've started my main applications, I dont see any good reason for running a readahead daemon 20 seconds after user logs into X for example.<BR/><BR/>Regarding modprobe, it might be possible to use insmod in some cases? I imagine quite a lot of modules could be loaded with that instead of modprobe, as aliases for for example crypto algorithms is unimportant.<BR/>Maybe something that calculates direct insmod statements everywhere where possible (can check if kernel args changed, and update cache when needed) and stuffs them in a script that's executed directly?Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14195562455569963307noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-74999482356704722842008-09-30T10:19:00.000+02:002008-09-30T10:19:00.000+02:00Have you tried to boot with "quiet" parameter, it ...Have you tried to boot with "quiet" parameter, it can be an improvement in some machines when kernel starts at first (before udev)<BR/><BR/>Thanks for your work! :-)<BR/><BR/>PachoPacho Ramoshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18395545946160375089noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-26191650189664904972008-09-30T06:46:00.000+02:002008-09-30T06:46:00.000+02:00Carlos : while it might be doable for expert users...Carlos : while it might be doable for expert users, rebuilding a kernel on each hardware configuration is not doable automatically : it would require installing gcc / kernel-source on user system, having to rebuild the kernel (of course, in idle background, it would take a looong time and a lot free disk space). This would also depend on which hardware is plugged on the system at the time of the kernel configuration. Each kernel security update would respin the process. And if hardware change a little, kernel should be rebuilt.<BR/><BR/>Frankly, I've stopped building kernel for myself 8 years ago when I started working at Mandriva, because there was people more competent than me doing it and it was way faster. I'm not sure we should go back to "everybody rebuilds its kernel".Fredhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05183076812550842311noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-88529977378045407582008-09-30T01:34:00.000+02:002008-09-30T01:34:00.000+02:00What about allowing the user to remove the calls t...What about allowing the user to remove the calls to modprobe from the initscripts?<BR/>I always recompile my kernels with exactly my<BR/>hardware specification compiled in, so I have no modules at all.<BR/>There is no need to use modprobe at boot time<BR/>in this case, right?<BR/><BR/>So my suggestion would be to make it easy to remove the task of searching and loading modules from the initscripts. Is it possible?Mafrahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03632086596290998359noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-23317469159181492782008-09-29T21:50:00.000+02:002008-09-29T21:50:00.000+02:00- Regarding using flash for optimizing boot, even ...- Regarding using flash for optimizing boot, even hard disk manufacturer selling hybrid drive recognized Vista "feature" is not working at all.<BR/>- I'm not convinced by "defragmentation" speeding boot, specially with ext3, specially without any benchmarks.<BR/>- no issue found in GNOME 2.24 startup<BR/>- Anders, thanks for your idea, it might be interesting to add some additional custom headers to init scripts to "flag" such services and starting them "later" using PrcSys. Do you have any figures to check how much gain you got ?<BR/>- CkeekyGoat : don't worry, we haven't hardcoded nor changed any delay for usb storage (because we knew it could cause some problems). We just tried to make sure the usb settle delay was shared with other processes, so other processes could be run until dust settles over usb bus.<BR/>- Andre4s : well, it is extremely hardware dependent. On my favorite test box (P4 2.4Ghz, average harddrive), full boot went from 29 to 26s and perceived boot from 27.5s to 21s (I writing this from memory, I don't have the figures available right now).Fredhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05183076812550842311noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-12300455667101297212008-09-29T16:48:00.000+02:002008-09-29T16:48:00.000+02:00Great work Fred, and nice to have words to have wo...Great work Fred, and nice to have words to have words about the work done behind the doors by the Mandirva team.<BR/>Congrats !Willhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04674311021852908541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939875814284471727.post-109350116664723242008-09-29T12:53:00.000+02:002008-09-29T12:53:00.000+02:00Nice Read. And what is now the boot time for a com...Nice Read. And what is now the boot time for a complete boot in Mandriva?Andre4shttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03470092925751257692noreply@blogger.com