Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica) [LWN.net]

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 4:15 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (14 responses)

Supend/resume is good as far as it goes,

I have never seen this work reliably in Linux on any computer I have ever tried it on! At best the computer resumes, but there is always something missing, like sound. Fast boot (and fast shutdown, lets not forget about that side) is more likely to be implementable reliably, so more useful.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 4:22 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link] (11 responses)

My laptop, running fedora 10 has an uptime of 30+ days and it is suspended every night. It's not uncommon for this to work anymore.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 4:58 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (8 responses)

Mine too typically has an uptime of many days (sometimes weeks) and is suspended/resumed (to RAM, but hibernate works too) several times a day. When I am done "for the moment" I close the lid and it auto-suspends; I open it and it resumes in about 3-4 seconds. Mac users do this all the time, I'm pleased to be able to do it on linux. This is a Dell Vostro.

re happy stories about suspending Linux boxes

Posted Jun 11, 2009 7:18 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (7 responses)

Well, maybe I have been unusually unlucky, then. The last straw was a few weeks ago, when a netbook I bought with bundled Linux managed to suspend/resume once, but trying it again froze the machine, and the processor fan started whirring at full speed. Lucky the eeepc 901 has a hard reset button accessible with a straightened paper clip...

re happy stories about suspending Linux boxes

Posted Jun 11, 2009 8:45 UTC (Thu) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (2 responses)

I have to agree here - I've never seen a machine that can reliably suspend/resume under ordinary, everyday use. I build networks of the things for a living and we just disable power-saving because they rarely come back up in the same state they went down, and often just "hang" in suspend mode and you can't get them back (disconnect power entirely from the wall and wait a few seconds, reconnect, then press the power button is the only sure-fire way of getting it back).

It's very much dependent on the price paid for the hardware (so most people's hardware is just too cheap to do it), the manufacturer, the age (but that's *rarely* the issue), even the programs/hardware that are running at the time, and most importantly - the BIOS. Even my brand-new 2009-manufacturing-date laptop, bought for me by my employer can't do suspend/resume in Windows reliably, let alone Linux (but it is worse in Linux, which fits in with what I've experienced elsewhere). ACPI tables etc. play a big part in the process and most cheap computers have the bare minimum to let Windows play nicely and rarely, if ever, see a BIOS update to fix it.

In fact, I'm that disillusioned with suspend and related activities (Wake-on-LAN, etc.) that I just forget they exist now. They are rarely reliable on a well-used system (e.g. staff laptops) even if the system does support it and the machine is well-managed, so you can imagine what happens with 90% of people's PC's. Other network admins I speak to have the same problem and if they NEED this functionality (very rare), they specify it as terms of the supply contract so they can fall back on something. What happens then is that any kernel upgrades mean that the problems appear again (and thus they run ancient kernels to keep the functionality).

Apple Mac's seem to be much better, I grant you. I've not seen one of them fail to come back up. But even my Palm will sometimes refuse to turn on and that basically *lives* in sleep mode all the time. It's just not a reliable technology, even if there are pockets of experience that seem to indicate it is. And when we say "Linux machines", we're talking about a VAST range of hardware and thus, in general, "Linux machines" don't do suspend reliably (mainly because machines as a whole don't either).

re happy stories about suspending Linux boxes

Posted Jun 11, 2009 16:19 UTC (Thu) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (1 responses)

In my experience, it varies greatly from vendor to vendor: Dells normally work out of the box, Thinkpads are a bit trickier (there used to be a USB controller bug, in which it generates spurious wakeup signals preventing suspend, but there's an easy workaround).

I do agree that Macs have an advantage here -- being able to go from sleep to hibernate when the battery level goes critical. This is a new feature, though -- for a longest time Macs can't actually hibernate at all. Hopefully the PC world will eventually drop BIOS -- some laptops already ship with EFI firmwares, but with BIOS emulation forced to be on at all times.

re happy stories about suspending Linux boxes

Posted Jun 12, 2009 5:38 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Well the quicker XP goes away the quicker we will be rid of the traditional
bios. Vista and newer Windows OSes support EFI...

re happy stories about suspending Linux boxes

Posted Jun 11, 2009 19:12 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link]

My Thinkpad x301 is pretty reliably both with suspend and hibernate, using intrepid. Pulse audio kills the sound about once per week, but it does that regardless of whether I'm using suspend or keeping the computer on 24/7. And currently, it seems to be fixable by killing and restarting pulse and hal.

re happy stories about suspending Linux boxes

Posted Jun 11, 2009 21:49 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (2 responses)

my eee 901 w/ linux (straight ubuntu) suspends & resumes fine. Are you using the stock Xandros? Are you up to date on BIOS and fixes? IIRC, they have a number of BIOS fixes which refer to power.

re happy stories about suspending Linux boxes

Posted Jun 14, 2009 4:03 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

That was with the original installation. Upgrading the OS seems to have helped. OK, now I have one example of a Linux system where suspend/resume works. But one would have expected that since this is one of the rare cases where the hardware vendor co-operated with the distro maker on a known hardware configuration, suspend/resume would have worked out-of-the box.

re happy stories about suspending Linux boxes

Posted Jul 1, 2009 23:01 UTC (Wed) by SEMW (guest, #52697) [Link]

> But one would have expected that since this is one of the rare cases where the hardware vendor co-operated with the distro maker

My eeepc (1000) suspends and resumes perfectly -- with Ubuntu.

Admittedly, this is using the array.org customised kernel, but even so.

Sadly, my desktop, which uses much older, more standard hardware, doesn't. Oh well, can't win them all..

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 8:49 UTC (Thu) by roberton (guest, #39680) [Link] (1 responses)

Suspend/resume on my current setup works very well too. It's a Dell M1330 with Ubuntu 9.04 and I suspend/resume it half a dozen times a day. Only thing that sometimes goes wrong is that sound goes missing, but I don't think it ever hangs or has any other funnies. I don't know about hibernation; since suspend works so well and I use the computer so much I don't need it.

For me this is great progress. My previous laptop never had this working reliably, and that over several versions of Ubuntu and Fedora. Annoyingly suspend/resume would sometimes work, but not reliably enough to be able to use it. Since it is all about convenience having it die 1 in 3 times kind of stops it being a useful feature...

Regarding boot up, I have an Asus netbook which doesn't get used everyday and so is usually off. The fact that it boots up pretty quickly does definitely make a difference to how often I get it out though. If it took 2 minutes (bad even for Windows I know, but just as an illustration), then I would probably use it far less. And I also agree with another commenter, it's interesting to see _why_ linux takes X seconds and what can be done to improve it. The quest to improve boot times seems to have made people look again at some old and ugly stuff that would otherwise just be left.

Roberto/.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 11:00 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

All the laptops I have used recently suspend and resume correctly. I did borrow a laptop recently which didn't have working suspend, disabling the KMS fixed it, but unfortunately it had a defective lid switch (if bumped the switch would detect as "open" and so obviously after a train ride or plane flight the laptop would inevitably be found running very hot inside its bag) a problem I've seen before in laptops designed by imbeciles.

It's important to report bugs in suspend & resume. If you take the attitude that "that never works in Linux" then there is no bug filed, no-one has any reason to investigate why, it doesn't get fixed, so you've created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Particularly if it "almost" works, so that you get some diagnostics (e.g. for a while SATA didn't survive suspend on some hardware, but this meant a resume would give you kernel IO error reports that you could write into a bug report - obviously "the screen stays blank" isn't as helpful to maintainers)

I have reported, and had fixed, several suspend/resume bugs in previous laptops, including regressions. None of us would sit around saying "it's a shame the Linux USB subsystem crashes when you plug in a mouse, but that's just the way it has to be I suppose" (at least I hope not). Take the same attitude to any sub-system you want to work. If it's worth moaning about (as several have taken time to do in this comment thread) then it's worth writing a proper bug report.

My desktop PC doesn't (or didn't the last time I tried, it runs for months at a time recording TV and managing my DSL connection, so I don't try new kernels often) suspend correctly, but I believe that's related to the Nouveau driver, which is reverse-engineered from nVidia's super-secret hardware - so that's not a huge surprise.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 5:40 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (1 responses)

My Dell D620 works perfectly with suspend/resume on Ubuntu 8.10.

- Only thing is that VirtualBox can't be running, or there's an about 20% chance of a crash, but it's not really fair to blame anybody but Sun about that one.

However, hibernation is very unstable.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 15:20 UTC (Thu) by szh (guest, #23558) [Link]

On my Dell D610 suspend never worked (both to-RAM and to disk) on all the latest versions of OpenSuse and on Ubuntu 8.04 and 9.04.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 9:57 UTC (Thu) by danpb (subscriber, #4831) [Link] (2 responses)

Both my Thinkpad x31 and Thinkpad t60p suspend/hibernate/resume just fine and I typically have uptimes of more than a month. Kernel updates are the only reason I ever do a real reboot.

IMHO this fixation of boot-time & pretty boot screens is diverting energy from more useful work. I'd rather hibernate-to-disk were 50% faster than boot-time be reduced from 20 to 10 seconds. If we care about pretty graphical boot, then we should focus on making hibernate / restore pretty. Those are things I experience every morning & evening.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 14:10 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]

Surely that's disk-limited?

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 19:16 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link]

Part of the charm of the 10 second boot is that they plan to completely drop the boot splash, so they really aren't fixated about pretty boot screens. :--)

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 16:37 UTC (Thu) by Stephen_Beynon (guest, #4090) [Link]

With the current stability of the Intel video drivers on Ubuntu Jaunty I
am lucky to have uptime measured in hours !