Kernel Summit: kexec and fast booting [LWN.net]

Kernel Summit: kexec and fast booting

Posted Jul 22, 2004 0:06 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: Kernel Summit: kexec and fast booting by hensema
Parent article: Kernel Summit: kexec and fast booting

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.

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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.