[Debian-eeepc-devel] 5 second boot desktop with documentation

Jelle de Jong jelledejong at powercraft.nl
Tue Jun 23 17:56:02 UTC 2009


Jelle de Jong wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> The new kernel 2.6.30-1-686 came into Debian this last week and I got
> the itches to do some fast boot testing. The result is still
> disappointing for me, its still the same as a year back and the kernel
> even got slower compared to 2.6.29-2-486 but there are some good points.
> 
> The parallel booting of script kind of works now. I added my results to
> the wiki I hope that's ok:
> http://wiki.debian.org/BootProcessSpeedup#Testsresultsofusers
> 
> purpose:
> I build a lot of different linux systems, some just need fast bootup
> like multimedia devices, easy internet devices, netbooks et cetera. one
> of the requirements is maintainability and stability. I don't get
> maintainability by recompiling my own software, so that is not an
> option. What is an option is to tweak all the configuration systems I
> can find, test them for stability and use them.
> 
> I use grub2 and it has no behavior like hiddenmenu, you can see three
> flashes during boot before it comes to the steady "loading system" state.
> 
> result:
> my boot process is around 5 á 6 seconds.

I spoke with the debian udev maintainer after posting this mail and I
showed him the some of my bootchart. So he said to me it had nothing to
do with udev and that the modprobe process was just waiting on the
kernel. So I started debugging and disabled all possible hardware in the
bios:
http://wiki.debian.org/BootProcessSpeedup?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=bootchart17.png

Now you can clearly see it is not an cpu or i/o issue. So I started to
blacklist kernel modules one by one, all audio, all bluetooth, all usb,
all network stuff.

Until I hit the eeepc_laptop module, this module is responsible for a
huge huge delay during bootup, and as soon as I removed it the boot time
speedup to around 6 seconds, and with some other tweaks I made a 5
second desktop WITHOUT any recompilation of code. My system only uses
configuration changes.

So if we can fix the grub2 issues and make it cleaner and faster we can
get some really nice desktop systems.

Am I the fist to hit the 5 second boundary without recompilation? :D

see all:
http://wiki.debian.org/BootProcessSpeedup?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=bootchart21.png
http://wiki.debian.org/BootProcessSpeedup?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=5-second-desktop-bootchart-v0.1.2j.tar.gz
http://wiki.debian.org/BootProcessSpeedup#Testsresultsofusers

Best regards,

Jelle de Jong



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