Arch Linux

zerophase

Member

Registered: 2015-09-03

Posts: 229

[SOLVED] slimming initramfs down, and having silent boot.

I've been following the Silent boot and Minimal initramfs guides.  Initially, I had a completely silent boot by removing fsck from the hooks, but when I added options to the BINARIES the fsck print out came back. I just wanted to check if fsck will still be run by systemd, if I remove the fsck option from BINARIES.

Last edited by zerophase (2016-07-07 23:13:18)

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: [SOLVED] slimming initramfs down, and having silent boot.

systemd should check the filesystem accordingly to your fstab settings.

You can modify the custom fsck service from Silent boot wiki page to pass the output to e.g. journal, if you want to be sure it works.

zerophase

Member

Registered: 2015-09-03

Posts: 229

Re: [SOLVED] slimming initramfs down, and having silent boot.

yeah, fsck is definitely not running from the systemd unit file. I have my kernel mounting as root during boot as read write, from rEFInd.conf.  I booted another kernel that's setup to use the standard fsck setup with root mounted in the bootloader config, rather than fstab, and fsck was still ran on it.  Is there anyway I could set passno, or get systemd to run the fsck unit when needed, other than first mounting as read only and then remounting the partition?

ewaller

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From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,774

Re: [SOLVED] slimming initramfs down, and having silent boot.

I am not sure why you are doing this, but if you really want to, it is possible to boot Linux without an initrd at all.  You might look into building a kernel with all of the drivers you need to boot built in rather than depending on them being modules available in the initrd.  You might look through the Gentoo documentation on how to do this.  All you need do in this case is tell the kernel where root is and pass it any other parameters and you are good to go.    You can get a good idea as to which modules you need to compile in by looking at the output of lsmod after you boot.

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zerophase

Member

Registered: 2015-09-03

Posts: 229

Re: [SOLVED] slimming initramfs down, and having silent boot.

I'm just playing around with the kernel to see if I can get those 2 to 5 second boot times I've heard about, after the bios gets up.  Of course, the major bottleneck is the bios taking 30 seconds to initialize.

EmilyShepherd

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From: Bucks, UK

Registered: 2016-03-20

Posts: 45

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Re: [SOLVED] slimming initramfs down, and having silent boot.

If you want an absolutely silent boot and are playing with building your own kernel, you could always simply remove the support for the framebuffer console, which is how the kernel outputs messages during startup.

This assumes that you don't ever need your console on your machine. Ie, you have a GUI installed and never need to dip into the console (terminal emulators are unaffected by this patch).

If you do want to do this, I'd recommend keeping a backup kernel so you have a fallback if you ever need to boot in a non-graphical mode (eg, for single user mode / a recovery shell).

https://gist.github.com/EmilyShepherd/2 … e92620b252

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zerophase

Member

Registered: 2015-09-03

Posts: 229

Re: [SOLVED] slimming initramfs down, and having silent boot.

Thanks, that was all very helpful. Ended up pulling boot time down by letting systemd start services.