Arch Linux

solarwind

Member

From: Toronto

Registered: 2008-03-18

Posts: 546

Linux Fast Boot

I remember the days of Dos. It would boot almost instantly. I'm not an MS fan (I hate them), but Linux seems to be taking a little long to boot. Even Minix boots up very fast.

Just for fun, I want to try to make my Linux kernel boot as fast as possible. Aside from disabling all modules and daemons, what can I do to make it boot up fast? It's got something to do with the init scripts, that I am sure of, but if anyone can point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it.

pheon

Member

From: Berlin, Germany

Registered: 2008-05-14

Posts: 91

Re: Linux Fast Boot

Hello,
this thread might be usefull for you.

Regards

---

watching someone else use your computer is like watching a drunk orangutan solve a rubix cube

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: Linux Fast Boot

- Prefixing a daemon in rc.conf with the @ symbol causes it to be loaded in the background. This is good for daemons that aren't dependencies of other daemons.

- Suspend and hibernate are your friends. Suspend offers instant resume with slight power consumption; hibernate is slower, but a hibernating computer doesn't need any power.

- Pare down your initrd. Instead of using klibc-udev to load your modules, just list the modules you need in mkinitcpio.conf. If, for instance, you're using a motherboard with an Intel chipset, IDE drives, and the ext3 filesystem, your module list would read:-

MODULES="ata_piix sd_mod ext3"

chromatic

Member

From: France

Registered: 2008-02-21

Posts: 26

Re: Linux Fast Boot

As you say yourself disabling the uneeded (and autoload) modules and service in rc.conf is a good start. Be sure to avoid auto dectection stuff in your bios and disable the things you dont use like some integrated peripherals or unused ports.

Compiling your own kernel is another things you can do, just compile inside the kernel what you need and choose module for what you use on some rare occasions. You case also use another kernel than the default arch one, like the zen-sources kernel, I use it since a long time and the overall performance improvement is really amazing. The zen-sources kernel is available on AUR but I don't know if it's still maintenaid, I personally use the recent zenmm-kernel (zen-sources with mm patches), you can find it on AUR too.

Only with this you're system will boot faster. My old athlon-xp 1800/Geforce Ti4200 boot in 20 seconds (i used bootchart) and, I don't have the faster memory than my motherboard can handle and the only hardware I bought in last 5 years (maybe more, don't remember) is a hard drive.

I think 20 seconds is good for an old computer like mine and I don't even use the @ symbol in the rc.conf for parallel services loading. So I think if you have a recent computer, you can have a really fast boot and there's some posts on the forum if you want to go further and try some more obscure optimisations.

solarwind

Member

From: Toronto

Registered: 2008-03-18

Posts: 546

Re: Linux Fast Boot

My boot times are fine already. I just want to see how far I can go. I removed all but the bare minimum modules and now I don't know what else I can do. Seems udev is taking the most time.

chromatic

Member

From: France

Registered: 2008-02-21

Posts: 26

Re: Linux Fast Boot

My boot times are fine already. I just want to see how far I can go. I removed all but the bare minimum modules and now I don't know what else I can do. Seems udev is taking the most time.

Yes udev takes time, it tooks more than 5700ms to initialize on my computer with the arch kernel, now i'm around 2500ms with the zen kernel.
One thing i forgot is to not use reiserfs on the root partition because it's the slowest filesystem when it comes to partition mounting, you can also disable the filesystem check in your fstab (for reiserfs) if you are not afraid.

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Re: Linux Fast Boot

Reiserfs is no longer slow on mounting, that got patched a while ago. However, I still avoid it, both for, uh, personal reasons and because it has shoddy overall performance and a tendency to fragment over time.

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2008-08-01 22:07:50)