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LPC: Booting Linux in five secondsLPC: Booting Linux in five secondsPosted Sep 22, 2008 20:26 UTC (Mon) by alspnost (guest, #2763)Parent article: LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds Great work - and seeing the fruits of this in normal distributions cannot come a moment too soon. It's laughable that my 64-bit dual-core beast of a machine still takes longer to boot our favourite efficient, modular OS than my 166MHz Pentium took to boot Windoze in 1996. Let's declare war on bloat and get the majority out-of-the-box Linux desktops booting in <5 seconds! No-one cares if servers take a few minutes to boot, but this article highlights some of the silliness occurring with humble netbooks. Mind you, I did wonder about buying another cheap netbook and using it as a lightweight home server :-)
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LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds Posted Sep 23, 2008 6:56 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Well, not all that "bloat" is bad. udev, for example, is a great invention; we probably don't want to create static /dev's for every laptop out there (I know I don't). And I don't really care if it's 5 or 15 seconds, so there is a lot of margin for adding such things back. But trimming the boot fat is still excellent news. Let's hope these improvements trickle down soon!
LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds Posted Sep 23, 2008 8:31 UTC (Tue) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
But if you are loading a kernel which has compiled-in support for a minimal hardware base, you can provide static /dev entries for just that hardware. udev was loaded later anyway if I read correctly. Actually, you could even have several such minimal kernels for different configurations and decide in advance which to load.
LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds Posted Sep 23, 2008 7:15 UTC (Tue) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
> No-one cares if servers take a few minutes to boot
Just FYI, historically servers have driven a lot of the, for instance, hardware changes necessary to get fast boot (ever noticed that default POST started skipping a number of mostly-useless checks in the last few years?). Mostly because people wanted be able to write big enterprise contracts saying "the server will be up 99.999% of the time", which gives you 5.2 minutes downtime per year, and if one reboot blows your yearly downtime budget, well...
(As far as I know no-one no-one cares about +-minute of reboot time in practice and the whole 99.999% thing is largely a gimmick, but you need it to be Marketing Compliant(TM), and apparently that's enough to drive BIOS changes etc. And hey, faster boots for us.)
LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds Posted Sep 25, 2008 15:01 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]
I don't know which servers you're looking at, but I generally find them to be relatively slow to boot. Whereas Microsoft has made fast booting (from the BIOS to the Windows loader) a requirement for putting the Windows logo on desktops and laptops.
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