Arch Linux

dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

My original boot time with a default arch install (measured with bootchart) was 23secs (Core 2 Duo 2ghz, 3gb ram).

I compiled the kernel manually from source (traditional method). I stripped down the kernel to as minimal as possible, made various optimizations, built all modules into the kernel, removing autoloading of modules, doing option 2 and commenting out a tonne of stuff in /etc/rc.sysinit and /etc/inittab.

This shaved my boot time down to 15 seconds.

Is there anything else I can do (not including suspend or anything like that) to improve boot time yet further, as i'm out of ideas.

BIOS takes about 7 seconds itself so I might go through the effort of flashing my BIOS (On a Dell Laptop with BIOS revision A02...anyone experienced speedup with a newer version?), though I have neither a floppy drive or floppy disks .

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flack 2.0.6: menu-driven BASH script to easily tag FLAC files (AUR)
knock-once 1.2: BASH script to easily create/send one-time sequences for knockd (forum/AUR)

Stoffi

Member

Registered: 2007-03-15

Posts: 107

Re: Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

you can update the bios from windows, if that is of any help..

zeratul289

Member

From: Liverpool, UK

Registered: 2008-03-07

Posts: 24

Re: Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

BIOS updates very rarely provide boot speedups and are mostly patches for serious bugs or support for other processors.

One thing I can recommend, if you haven't already, is background some of the daemons that run on startup. In rc.conf put an @ in front of any daemon that isn't dependent on any other. Other than that, there isn't all that much else you can do. If you don't use things such as uvesafb or require the initramfs in any way, you could probably also remove that line from GRUB's config.

As an additional: any changes you make to rc.sysinit will more than likely be replaced on the next initscripts upgrade. So, watch out for that.

Last edited by zeratul289 (2008-03-09 14:15:23)

dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Re: Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

@Stoffi: Unfortunately I have no Windows partition installed

@zeratul289: Backgrounding of daemons and removal of initrd i've already done. Thanks for the tip on the rc.sysnit file though.

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flack 2.0.6: menu-driven BASH script to easily tag FLAC files (AUR)
knock-once 1.2: BASH script to easily create/send one-time sequences for knockd (forum/AUR)

dunc

Member

From: Glasgow, UK

Registered: 2007-06-18

Posts: 559

Re: Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

Well, you're still doing better than me. I can't get mine below 20s (reported by bootchart, that is; about 40s when POST and everything else is taken into account).

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0 Ok, 0:1

dr_te_z

Member

From: Zoetermeer, the Netherlands

Registered: 2006-12-06

Posts: 154

Re: Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

Well, there are some drastical options left:
- another BIOS (http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot)
- use initng instad of init (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-boot-faster/index.html / https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InitNG).

Did not find references of Arch users, so keep us informed

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bangkok_manouel

Member

From: indicates a starting point

Registered: 2005-02-07

Posts: 1,556

Re: Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

latest udev from [testing] cut the module loading from 7 seconds something to 1 second something on my machine...

dyscoria

Member

Registered: 2008-01-10

Posts: 1,007

Re: Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

latest udev from [testing] cut the module loading from 7 seconds something to 1 second something on my machine...

That sounds good!

At the moment, i've given up on using a non-modular kernel as changes to /etc/udev/rules.d/udev.rules and /etc/rc.sysinit are just a hassle and also cause problems when booting the default kernel. I want to be able to use at least the default kernel as a fallback option in case my compiled version buggers up. The time a non-modular kernel saves on boot is somewhat unfulfilling aswell.

The kernel I am using at the moment has only a few optimizations, but maintains compatibility with the default kernel. Even though udev is already pretty quick on my system, when the new udev hits core then i'll be a happy person

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flack 2.0.6: menu-driven BASH script to easily tag FLAC files (AUR)
knock-once 1.2: BASH script to easily create/send one-time sequences for knockd (forum/AUR)

bangkok_manouel

Member

From: indicates a starting point

Registered: 2005-02-07

Posts: 1,556

Re: Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

well, previous [testing] udev was some kind of b0rked... delta with [core] udev would be around 3-4 sec max I guess (will depend on your setup of course)

ST.x

Member

From: Sydney, Australia

Registered: 2008-01-25

Posts: 363

Website

Re: Is there anything left I can do to speed up boot?

overclock =p well since its a lappy maybe a little bit.

Last edited by ST.x (2008-03-11 09:10:59)

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