Sorry to hang up on this part of the discussion, I've just subscribed fedora-devel because I knew there was a discussion about the boot time on Fedora. I was trying to improve the boot time with FC2 some weeks ago, and I got very interesting results. This is not directly related to the boot poster, it is just a trial and error work to improve FC2 boot time. My machine: P4-M 2.8Ghz HT 512MB RAM 4200RM hard disk drive (dell notebook, very slow compared to a desktop machine) Fedora Core 2 + updates Nvidia card with nvidia drivers Critical times for me: GDM: Time from GRUB until GDM gets ready to login an user GNOME: Time to load the whole gnome-session for the fist time EPIPHANY: Time to load epiphany for the fist time OPENOFFICE: Time to load any openoffice application for the fist time Original timings: - GDM: 75 seconds (more than 1 minute!) - GNOME: 41 seconds - EPIPHANY: 5 seconds - OPENOFFICE: 22 seconds Results: - GDM: 38 seconds (!!) - GNOME: 19 seconds - EPIPHANY: 2 seconds - OPENOFFICE: 5 seconds (!!) Bottlenecks I couldn't resolve: - IDE detection in the kernel - init start time - USB detection - nvidia driver probing for monitor/lcd/tv - gnome trying to load 1500 files (it seems to be resolved now with icon-cache, owen?) FC3 seems to be slower. I've just installed FC3 this week, and I really miss my old boot timings Method: Since I am the only one who uses this notebook, and it doesn't change the hardware, there are several things that doesn't need to be running, and several other things that doesn't need to be checked (quota for example) I've also changed the order of things that are started, for example there is no need to load httpd nor sshd before bringing gdm up. Gory details: - I disabled: - kudzu - rhgb - netfs - sendmail - I added "fastboot" option to the kernel. I saw that rc.sysinit use this flag to skip some things, I don't remember what exactly did at this time - I commented out every unneeded check by rc.sysinit on my machine (like quotas) - I prepared an readahead.early.files running strace -e trace=open on X and gdm - the fist thing that I put in rc.sysinit was an hdparm command the get the best of my slow disk - readahead.early.files is processed asynchronously with low priority as soon as possible (on top of rc.sysinit). It preloads X+gdm - I commented out the line that loads prefdm in iniitab, replacing it with a chkconfig script - I disabled "unix:" fonts in X, so xfs was disabled - the fisrt script to run runlevel 5 is the prefdm chkconfig script, I added "ifup lo" in before loading the real prefedm script - services like pcmcia, sshd, httpd, and others are loaded with low priority behinds the scenes, while x+gdm are starting. They ever load fine, so I don't need to see if they load or not. - I prepared a readahead.files running strace -e trace=open over gnome- session + gnome componentes (gnome-panel, gconfd and others). There I found all the icons loaded by gnome-panel (by the theme I suppose) - readahead is executed against readahead.files just after gdm is ready to accept a login. I did it measuring the time and adding a sleep command before running readahead (cof cof) - while the user (me) is entering the username and password, the gnome session is preloaded with readahead. - I prepared another readahead file running strace -e trace=open over openoffice and epiphany - I set up gnome-session-properties to run this readahead just after loading the gnome-session (priority 90 did the work) This approach doesn't make the system faster at all, but it seems faster to the user. The main trick is to change the order of loading the system components and preload the slowest applications. I don't think that this is applicable to the distribution as a whole, but I know that some things than can help on this type of customization and may be applied on Fedora 1. rc.sysinit could be modularized, so the user can disable/enable some bits of it without touching the script file. An easy way could be to move some part of it to chkconfig scripts 2. prefdm in inittab could be moved to a chkconfig script, and the order of services could be changed so prefdm could be started before starting services like httpd, sshd, and others 3. figure out a way to automate the generation of readahead files to match the most used files I know that Seth Nickell was working on 1 and 2, but I haven't heard of that again (SystemServices) I would be glad to help on improving Fedora boot time -- Franco Catrin L. TUXPAN http://www.tuxpan.com/fcatrin
