Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted Apr 30, 2010 21:24 UTC (Fri) by intgr (subscriber, #39733)
In reply to: Poettering: Rethinking PID 1 by cmccabe
Parent article: Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

> 2. Minimize boot time. This is very important for server admins trying to
> get to "five nines" of uptime. Sometimes you are upgrading your kernel or
> hardware, and you just have to reboot. It needs to be quick.

Unfortunately for servers, any boot process optimization is completely irrelevant because the proprietary BIOS and SAS controller take a whole 5 minutes to initialize. It's a little ironic that the cheapest desktop computer can be up and running in 30 seconds, but the more expensive your server, the slower is your boot time.

Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

Posted Apr 30, 2010 21:45 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link]

>It's a little ironic that the cheapest desktop computer can be up and running in 30 seconds, but the more expensive your server, the slower is your boot time.

Oh it's a good tradeoff. Given enough cores - and SGI has done these experiments - the firmware will be faster enough than the Linux kernel bootup. :-) IIRC it was something like.. 12 minutes for 4096 cores?