[clug] ARS: Ubuntu 9.10 boot optimizations: 5 second startup with an SSD

[David Schoen]

I'm really interested to see if this succeeds where others have already failed.

Back when I still used Gentoo someone implemented a parallel boot
feature that in theory you could enable by opening up /etc/conf.d/rc
and setting:
RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="yes"

I say in theory because if you ever wanted to start something "weird"
at boot time it would inevitably fail due to a missing dependency
somewhere letting it start before it should do, but only sometimes.

4 or so years on and it seems like the Gentoo parallel boot is
actually stable for parallel booting but not providing much speed
improvement (at least that I've found from anyone who cares to post -
http://repura.livejournal.com/35979.html ).

If Ubuntu can do it in such a way that it works well enough first time
around it may actually be adopted by the masses. If it has any where
near the teething problems that Gentoo's version did I can't see it
taking off at all which would be very disappointing.


Cheers,
Dave

p.s. on the Windows sysadmins thiing I also hate that most don't
bother setting stand by times. My first real job was as a Windows
sysadmin, I can't remember how to do it now but I enabled all machines
where I worked to go in to standby in less than a mornings work, which
was easily justified by the power savings. I'm pretty sure it involved
pointing and clicking at power.cpl and some how storing the settings
in Group Policy.

2009/10/1 Paul Wayper <paulway at mabula.net>:
> The amusing thing about occasionally reading the Linux Haters blog is that
> they so often completely miss the point in their zeal to trash anything that
> Linux is doing.  I'm sure that the rumours of the Linux kernel being
> "bloated" and "full of regressions" (which are Linus's words at the recent
> Linux Plumbers Conference round-table) are eagerly being misreported too.
>
> There are still a lot of people who shut down every night and start up every
> morning.  My partner is one, using Windows 2000, which can take upwards of
> two minutes every time.  And there are plenty of stories of people opening
> up their bag to find their Mac has been gently roasting itself by not
> correctly suspending and sitting, powered up and closed, in their backpack.
>
> There are still people leaving their computers on at night (a big problem at
> almost every place I've worked) because they can't be bothered with the wait
> (however long it is) to get the machine booted in the morning.  At a place I
> worked recently they were seriously going to spend several thousand dollars
> on power boards that would sit on every desk and allow people to turn their
> machine physically off at the wall (rather than reach under the desk and
> plug) so they could virtuously save power rather than have the machine's
> power supply chewing up a watt or so.  Why?  Because it was too difficult to
> get the Windows sysadmins to enable the "stand by" option in Windows XP.
>  (Note that this didn't fix the problem of people not turning their machines
> off, it only added a tiny improvement - and an extra procedure - to those
> virtuous people that did).
>
> So there are plenty of people who would benefit from faster boot times.
>  And, chances are, those improvements are going to flow through into faster
> everything.  Upstart is the big leader in this field - its whole purpose is
> to parallelise the process of changing states (e.g. power off to booted up,
> booted up to suspend to RAM, etc).  Getting that working improves people's
> suspend to RAM times down as well as improving the boot time.  If you can
> get the boot to happen faster by reading everything it needs before it's
> needed, then you can do the same with applications.
>
> I don't bother to reply to the Linux Haters blog, though, because the whole
> thing is basically a big troll.  E might have a point occasionally, but
> that's irrelevant to the issue of hating "Linux" (whatever that is).
>
> Have fun,
>
> Paul