Speeding up the boot, a non-scientific report

Petter Reinholdtsen pere at hungry.com
Sat May 24 19:22:38 UTC 2008


The household just got a new Thinkpad X60s, and as a test I tried to
speed up the boot of Debian/Lenny on this machine.  Started by
installing bootchart for measurement, and the initial installation
used 48 seconds to boot according to bootchart.  This was after a
fresh desktop installation.

Next, installed dash and enabled it as /bin/sh, installed insserv and
activated dependency based boot, installed readahead (from Sid, the
version in Lenny got a few issues) and profiled it.  Also enabled
concurrent startpar style booting (after patching init.d/rc to fix
#481770), and disabled the hwclock*.sh boot scripts (as the machine
uses HW clock on GMT and the kernel is already fetching the time
before the init.d scripts are started).

On the following measurement of the boot time, it was down to 30
seconds (37.5% reduction).

To gain further reduction, upgrading to the portmap package uploaded
to unstable will cut down 1 second.  Not sure what to do after this.
Anyone got any clues?

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen




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