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

[Alan Jenkins]

On 6/23/09, Jelle de Jong <jelledejong at powercraft.nl> wrote:
> 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

Wow, my 701 doesn't have this problem with eeepc-laptop.  We
definitely need to fix that delay!  Which model is this exactly?

Please check you're not using the pciehp module (with pciehp_force=1).
 I think there's a problem where pciehp caused large delays, and
debian-eeepc enabled pciehp_force.  Nowadays eeepc-laptop is supposed
to do the same job, without any delays.

Now you've blacklisted eeepc-laptop, it would be great if you could
confirm the problem by running "time modprobe eeepc-laptop" on a
running system.

If this is really eeepc-laptop, a good start would be to post the
output of "dmesg", after booting with the option "printk.time=1" and
loading eeepc-laptop.

Regards
Alan