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Kernel Summit: kexec and fast bootingKernel Summit: kexec and fast bootingPosted Jul 21, 2004 22:13 UTC (Wed) by hensema (guest, #980)Parent article: Kernel Summit: kexec and fast booting Note that the random seeks on disk can be avoided by a technique used by Windows XP: that OS 'remembers' what sectors of the disk were accessed during boot, and places them close to each other on disk. This is a kind of optimized disk defragmentation. There is a lot of performance to be gained with this technique, I think. Also, this is desperately needed. Booting Linux is slow. Very slow. On a server this is no problem, but it's not acceptable on a desktop which is switched off every night.
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Kernel Summit: kexec and fast booting Posted Jul 22, 2004 0:06 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] Windows only locates some minimal items to the front of the disk. The rest are still located all over the disk. The save most of their time by delaying most items until a user has logged in. So you get the window up front asap and the apps you need later. They also have an 'integrated' windowing system and kernel. Putting X into the kernel would speed up boot time tons...of course it would lead to a lot of problems.
Can X be started earlier? Posted Jul 22, 2004 14:59 UTC (Thu) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link] It would seem to me that you should be able to get X running before Linux is completely booted for users that want a GUI. Now with the XFree86 fork, perhaps it will be possible to initialize the kernel and X with perhaps the user's GUI of choice. It also seems that it should take advantage of multiple cpus and hyperthreading when available.
Kernel Summit: kexec and fast booting Posted Jul 22, 2004 19:15 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] If the kernel didn't block booting while initializing devices, it could start init as soon as the device with the root filesystem was found, and X could start as soon as the video device was detected. It wouldn't actually help to put X in the kernel (aside, I guess, from having it loaded efficiently by the bootloader before other things are using the disk); the real gains would come from not waiting for anything unnecessary. For that matter, it doesn't matter where X is if xdm isn't started until after alsa, exim, inetd, lpd, sshd, atd, and cron.
Kernel Summit: kexec and fast booting Posted Jul 29, 2004 15:48 UTC (Thu) by astor (guest, #7383) [Link] It should be possible to do a simple version of this - just remember all the programs that were executed during startup, and put them in a cramfs image which is used as a cachefs/overlaidfs over the original file system during booting. It should be possible to read the cramfs in a few seconds.
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