dynamic tick patch and slow boot [LWN.net]

dynamic tick patch and slow boot

Posted Sep 2, 2005 3:29 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (guest, #2599)
Parent article: The state of the dynamic tick patch

One issue, apparently, is that systems running with dynamic tick tend to boot slowly, and nobody has yet figured out why.

I know the CELF group has done some detailed studies of boot time (an obvious point of interest for CE devices), and I thought LWN covered some more generic kernel boot-time studies--with graphs, even--a year or two back. Has anyone done something like that yet? More precisely, is the slowness evenly spread across all kernel subsystems, or is it confined only to those related to HW probing, or ...? That seems like an obvious first step to understanding the nature of the problem.

Greg

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dynamic tick patch and slow boot

Posted Sep 8, 2005 23:35 UTC (Thu) by barrygould (guest, #4774) [Link]

I don't think this is about KERNEL boot timing, but here's some recent articles about Fedora boot times:

http://www.improvedsource.com/view.php/Linux-System/2/

http://www.improvedsource.com/view.php/Linux-System/3/

Also, I believe the articles on LWN in the past were not specifically about kernel boot times either, IIRC.

Barry

dynamic tick patch and slow boot

Posted Sep 9, 2005 3:56 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

Also, I believe the articles on LWN in the past were not specifically about kernel boot times either, IIRC.

Now that you mention it, I believe you're correct. Pity...

Ah, yes, here's the front-page article I was remembering: Fedora: an example of community involvement, which led to the Bootchart project. And a year earlier, there was this article: Boot Linux faster (IBM developerWorks). Nothing obvious for the kernel itself, though I'm almost certain the CELF folks did a fair bit of work on that.

Greg