Testing fast parallell boot with Debian?

Petter Reinholdtsen pere at hungry.com
Tue Apr 4 20:40:42 UTC 2006


Here is a summary on what to do to test parallel booting with
Debian/unstable.

 - Install the bootchart package to get a graph of the boot process.
   Do a test boot passing init=/sbin/bootchartd to the kernel during
   boot to activate it.

 - Edit /etc/default/rcS, insert CONCURRENCY=startpar to enable
   parallel init.d script execution with serialized output.

 - Install the insserv package, run update-bootsystem-insserv to
   reorder the boot scripts for maximum parallel execution based on
   dependency information.  Review the order in /etc/rc*.d/ to check
   that it look sane.  This step can be undone using
   'update-bootsystem-insserv restore'

 - Edit /etc/default/rcS, switching DELAYLOGIN from yes to no, and
   thus allow kdm/gdm/xdm to log in users while the machine boots in
   the background.

There are also a few tests I have not tried myself:

 - Install the preload package to enable readahead at the end of
   rc2.d/.  Not sure if this will speed up the boot or not.

 - Install the readahead package from Ubuntu,
   <URL:ftp://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/r/readahead/>.  The
   files to load should probably be adjusted for Debian, but it might
   speed up the boot nontheless.
Does this work for anyone else but me?

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen




More information about the initscripts-ng-devel mailing list