David Zeuthen wrote:
You're ideas sound very promising, as I myself have a strong opinion as to how things should be, however I do not yet have the expertise to implement them myself, and other seem to think such too complicated. You're ideas however are a good step. I would just like to raise to issues.Hi,
So I had a brief look at shortening startup/login time and tried disabling rhgb in favor of starting gdm early. It looks pretty promising; here are some wall-clock numbers from two runs of each configuration:
| gdm_early | rhgb+gdm | ----------------------+------+-------+-------+------+ GRUB timeout | 0:00 | 0:00 | 0:00 | 0:00 | Starting udev | 0:13 | 0:13 | 0:13 | 0:14 | HW init done | 0:25 | 0:25 | 0:26 | 0:26 | rhgb visible | N/A | N/A | 0:36 | 0:35 | gdm login visible | 0:43 | 0:44 | 1:25 | 1:26 | gdm login entered | 0:52 | 0:52 | 1:31 | 1:32 | GNOME banner visible | 1:13 | 1:14 | 1:40 | 1:41 | Nautilus Background | 1:33 | 1:32 | 1:51 | 1:52 | Panel visible | 1:43 | 1:43 | 2:02 | 2:02 | HD activity off | 1:59 | 1:56 | 2:13 | 2:14 |
The milestones should be pretty self evident. This is on a stock FC3
system running on a IBM T41 1.6GHz (running on AC power), 512MB RAM
without any services manually disabled.
In addition to starting gdm early, the modifications also start up a few services, D-BUS, HAL and NetworkManager, that is critical to the GNOME desktop.
Some random thoughts/observations:
- We get the gdm window 40 secs faster
- The 12 secs from "Starting udev" to "HW init done" can be mostly shaved away/run in parallel
- Kernel bootstrap time (13 secs) can probably be much shorter (that's what some kernel guys say anyway)
- With this hack we shave twenty secs of the booting time (e.g. from GRUB until you can use your PC) but booting still feels much quicker because of the interaction with gdm in the middle (YMMV; e.g. placebo effect etc.)
- rhgb+gdm spawns an X server each which is sort of stupid and unsafe (or so some Xorg guys tell me). This solution, per design, avoids doing that
- we don't get the kudzu screen nor the fsck screens or any other console interactions. However, IMHO, such screens are not good UI in the first place - we should instead have GUI replacemnts that possibly notifies you when you log into the desktop session (stuff like NetworkManager and HAL alleviates such problems for networking and storage devices)
- we don't get service startup notification, but, uhmm, is it really useful learning that the "Console Mouse Service" or "Printing Sub- system" have started? Instead, this stuff could just be put in gdm
- it could be interesting to make /sbin/init own a D-BUS service that gdm and other stuff can query and interact with. Could also be fun to completely replace it with something a'la the SystemServices prototype that Seth did last year; links
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=4711 http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2003/Sep/27
- Could be interesting to instrument the kernel with some pagefault counters etc. and attempt do more readahead on e.g. the GNOME libs (both Windows XP and Mac OS X does all that; I think we do too but I've been told it can be improved)
So, anyway, I think it could be interesting to discuss starting gdm instead of rhgb. If you want to try out my crude hack, grab the file here
http://people.redhat.com/davidz/newinit.sh
put it in on your system as /newinit.sh, chmod a+x it and change this line /etc/inittab
si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
to these two lines
#si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit si::sysinit:/newinit.sh
and you should be set to go! If it breaks you get to keep both pieces; e.g. try this at your own risk [1].
Cheers, David
[1] :if it doesn't work you can boot your kernel with init=/bin/sh, do a 'mount -n -o remount,rw /' and edit your /etc/inittab file to point to the original sysinit.
1) I am all for removing outputs of kudzu, fsck and init.d, esp. this makes potential convertees somewhat scared to put it one way. However I would hope that just as Fedora provides a 'Details' option, a 'Show' option should be enabled to allow output from these things.
2) I am all for speeding up the system starup/login (although I have a 750 Mhz Intel and it really doesn't bother me at all), but would this optimization be a Gnome only perk? Or would this be equally or at least similiarly beneficial to kdm (KDE).
Thanks
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