Ubuntu 10.04 Already Shortens The Boot Time

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 10.04 Already Shortens The Boot Time

Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1 was released last week and while it did not bring any major features yet for this Long-Term Support release of Ubuntu Linux to be released in April of 2010, it began to introduce some underlying changes like the switch to the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, X Server 1.7, and the complete removal of HAL. Our early benchmarks of Ubuntu 10.04 show that there are some negative performance regressions right off the bat, but that is from within the Linux desktop. One area that Canonical is focusing upon in particular with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is speeding up the boot process, so we decided to provide some benchmarks there too.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14453

[Kano]

Well I don't have got such lowend hardware, but bootchart is about 15s with E8400 and a pure Kanotix install And there are even there are mounted filesystems in the fstab for other partitions than / - which is not the case on U. There you have to click on a partition to mount - the name of it is the very informative uuid then, what do you learn from this? Usefull only for 1 system installs those benchmarks.

[deanjo]

a pure Kanotix install

*Shameless plug

[ethana2]

"these kernel patches from Moblin remove a time delay in waiting for all devices before mounting the root file-system"


Are you telling me that after blowing $245 on an 80GB Intel X-25M 80GB SATA SSD, and upgrading the firmware and aligning the partitions and sectors and using TRIM tools.. on a laptop with hardware that never, ever, ever, changes, from the mic to the mouse... that Ubuntu WAITS to even mount the root fs until all devices respond?!? Is that what that flashing text cursor for one second is?! And then it initializes hardware devices.. one at a time?! NOT COOL. NOT. COOL.

[Svartalf]

Well I don't have got such lowend hardware, but bootchart is about 15s with E8400 and a pure Kanotix install

Would we expect any different distro, Kano? As deanjo said- shameless plug?

While boot times are nifty, I honestly wish they'd sort out PulseAudio problems (I go 20-40 minutes and there's a growing chance Pulse packs it up and I have to reboot on my main machine to get sound...sigh...) or back some other sound solution that actually works on all platforms correctly.

[bugmenot]

This is extremely sloppy reporting.

In 9.10 bootchart added 45 second delay to get more data. Thus bootchart is 45 seconds longer than any bootchart from 9.04, 8.10 etc.

It looks like in 10.04 they removed the extra 45 seconds. I'm not sure if they reduced the 45 seconds or removed completely.

Please update your news article stating that in 9.10 bootchart adds 45 second compared to previous bootcharts.

In ubuntu forum bootchart thread everyone complained when 9.10 came out because their bootchart times doubled. I had to explain numerous times to subtract 45 seconds to compare to previous times.

Post your Karmic bootcharts or boot times!

How to shave 45 seconds from your bootchart ..

Code:

sudo nano /etc/init/bootchart.conf

comment out this section
Code:

#pre-stop script
# Sleep for an extra 45s to allow enough time to chart the desktop
# login
# [ "$UPSTART_STOP_EVENTS" = "stopped" ] && sleep 45
#end script

How did you guys not notice something fishy when 9.10 was reporting 59 seconds and 10.04 had 25 seconds?

From article

In the past, we had been able to boot Ubuntu 9.10 faster, but these are clean Bootchart results from Ubuntu 9.10 on a stock installation.

That's because adding 45 second delay was introduced during one of the later alphas of 9.10 I think. Everyone panicked until someone realized the 45 second delay added.

[BlackStar]

"these kernel patches from Moblin remove a time delay in waiting for all devices before mounting the root file-system"


Are you telling me that after blowing $245 on an 80GB Intel X-25M 80GB SATA SSD, and upgrading the firmware and aligning the partitions and sectors and using TRIM tools.. on a laptop with hardware that never, ever, ever, changes, from the mic to the mouse... that Ubuntu WAITS to even mount the root fs until all devices respond?!? Is that what that flashing text cursor for one second is?! And then it initializes hardware devices.. one at a time?! NOT COOL. NOT. COOL.

That's not just Ubuntu, every distro I've tried has some arbitrary boot delay to allow devices to settle. Without this delay, it becomes very difficult to boot from USB, for example.

I'm pretty sure the "blinking cursor" period is initrd initliazing. In Arch, you could shave a significant amount of time by removing unnecessary modules from that - but this is a tradeoff between generic hardware support and boot speed.

My solution on Arch was to create a "fastboot" initrd tailored to my hardware (only EXT4 and sata/scsi modules, not even keyboard/mouse support) and a slow generic intird as a fallback in case my hardware ever changed.

[latchkeyed]

s/there are less process starting up/there are fewer process starting up/

[lordmetroid]

I am booting my Archlinux lightningfast, probably under 10 seconds on the Intel Atom 330(Never measured the time). It was really easy to accomplish, you just don't start anything but what you need.

[HannesB]

Dear Phoronix-Team,

Ubuntu 9.10 without any patches/updates is known to have serious bootup-speed-regressions in its initial state:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/432089

This was fixed by replacing sreadahed with ureadahead for most users.
It would be interesting if you would repeat the test with an up-to-date karmic (PPA enabled)

Cheers,
Hannes