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LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds


wetelectric

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At the Linux Plumbers Conference Thursday, Arjan van de Ven, Linux developer at Intel and author of PowerTOP, and Auke Kok, another Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds. The hardware was an Asus EEE PC, which has solid-state storage, and the two developers beat the five second mark with two software loads: one modified Fedora and one modified Moblin. They had to hold up the EEE PC for the audience, since the time required to finish booting was less than the time needed for the projector to sync.

http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/299483/fa0208e48cf3eeac/

Here's the youtube vid:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=s7NxCM8ryF8

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This is really awesome. I wanted to install a modified Fedora/Moblin on my wife's eee, but she asked me why she needed it to boot so fast. Seems she's satisfied with a 20 second boot. Sometimes I think she doesn't understand...

Personally, I think that computers should be booting faster, but that some startup stuff is really taking too much time. On this track, Vista is moving in the right way. For example you can open Services, and then change non-essential things that start with the OS to "Automatic (Delayed)". Personally, I don't think things like iPhones update should be running at startup, so I delay them until the system is idle. Boot tweaking is cool.

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It's a bit a car. See, Joe Shmoe wants to get to work, but he's fine with his 1.4 litre rustbucket that does 100MPH and takes 15 seconds to hit 60MPH. Sure, if you're a speed freak, 0-60 in 2.8 seconds and a top speed of 320MPH is nice, you might well ask why not everyone wants that but the truth is, most people just don't need it. I'm not a typical user and I'm fine with my Vista boot time, it doesn't take long, certainly not long enough for me to sit twiddling my thumbs wishing it'd hurry up.

Once upon a time OSs could be stored in a couple of MB of ROM and the further you go back the smaller the OSs were. This was fine, but as computer have progressed software has become bigger and more and more complex requiring much more configuration and much more code to run (or decide whether to run, even). You could say that OSs don't need to be 8GB installed and I might well agree with you but while things could be a bit smaller/cleaner/more efficient, I'm not sure I'd complain too much about XP/Vista/OSX/many Linux distros on decent hardware right now. If you're into losing 0.2 seconds off your boot time then by all means have fun doing so, I just don't think everyone tweaks like that.

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My EeePc 701 (512mb) with Ubuntu-eee 804-1 boots up in 1 min and 05 seconds.

And thats quick a nuf for me.

Gerard

pfft, admit it, you'd love it if you could flip a switch and have it boot in 5.Release the hacker inside.......

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Vista boots in about 1min for me, that's fine, normally i wake up hit the button and go take a leek, by the time im back shes ready for my emails to be checked, when it comes to laptop, if i need it quickly then i wont go from cold boot, just stick her in stand by.

5sec is cool, but as mentioned it like a car, you can own a car that will get you from a-b, so you can own something that can get you there faster, but will you actually get to use it?

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I admit if ubuntu-eee could really boot up in 5 sec that it will be great...

(the point is i to old do to believe in fairytales)

Gerard

hahaha 'fairytales'? I believe they actually did it, whether the resultant system is usable or not is another thing entirely. :)

Speaking as a suse user, i would love to have the guy apply his methods to a kde boot..

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"In this blog entry, Fred Crozat (head of Mandriva's engineering team in France) explains in great detail how his team has been detecting and getting rid of bottlenecks in the boot process, from the early stages to loading the desktop environment, thus decreasing overall boot time. An informative tour of the nuts and bolts of the boot process and how they can be tinkered with: initrd, initscripts, udev, modprobe calls. The basic tool they use for performance analysis is bootchart, which produces a map of process information and resource utilization during boot. The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type her password."

Looks like slashdot has picked up the story. This time though it is with mandiva 2009....

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Vista boots in about 1min for me, that's fine, normally i wake up hit the button and go take a leek, by the time im back shes ready for my emails to be checked, when it comes to laptop, if i need it quickly then i wont go from cold boot, just stick her in stand by.

5sec is cool, but as mentioned it like a car, you can own a car that will get you from a-b, so you can own something that can get you there faster, but will you actually get to use it?

Vista's sleep mode is seriously cool. Though I have to restart cold from time to time, I always just use sleep. It is so fast! All my windows are still open! I just wish I knew how to Hack the LED light to be off while sleeping...

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  • 3 months later...

Frankly, that is just silly. Boot time was made an issue by Microsoft because windows had to be rebooted multiple times per day and businesses were losing money. If they had made an OS that could just stay on and work boot time would not be an issue. My desktop has been rebooted about 4 times in 2 years on Debian 4 for kernel updates and power outages. Same with my laptop on Debian 5.

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don't know if vista is hackable enough to get a 5 sec. boot time, but im sure when it comes to booting linux it depends on how many kernel modules that are set to load at boot time, and weather or not your the cool guy who knows how to set it to only boot what you want (i.e. only the proper drivers, and etc)

I know a guy with one of those Qosmio laptops, and he runs ubuntu, but he's all into the whole "i got it so it will only boot the modules i want to" type of thing.

I am not so inclined with this, but I will say this, if I could get a 5 sec boot time out my laptop it would be freaking awesome because I got a short $hit for a battery (1.7 hrs at best) and even sleep mode will drag it down, but thats because most of the time if I have it on sleep mode with the battery, I am coming home or going to school which is about 45 min. to an hour away.

Vista's sleep mode is freaking awesome, hell it's the only version of windows I have seen that doesnt seem messed up when you get it out of sleep.

I also knew a guy a long time ago that hacked up his windows 98 install that booted in under 20 seconds, but it looked god awefully horrible because he took out so much of the origional windows programs and put oddball fit in programs to use it with. BUT the other thing was that the install itself only took up about 50mb.

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