[opensuse-factory] Booting in 5 seconds
Not long time ago, I posted to project mail list question is it possible to boot in a 5 seconds, like described in: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=869&num=1 and here is the article that explains what to do. http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ It is not cookbook, but gives ideas. -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
2008/12/22 Rajko M.
Not long time ago, I posted to project mail list question is it possible to boot in a 5 seconds, like described in: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=869&num=1
and here is the article that explains what to do. http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
It is not cookbook, but gives ideas.
Very intersting! The Splash Top stuff, looks a lot better than I expected, though I'd seen they had 512MB dedicated RAM for it. Personally, I'd rather have modules, and pay the 0.5 seconds, than have memory clogged up with crap I never use, post-boot for ever and a day. Upstart is something I looked at under Ubuntu, and also the readahead. It seemed a touch broken at that point, but having the kernel helper, give feedback, and have it do the i/o when it's idle, does seem to fix that. Why would readahead by a significant benefit with an SSD though? It's going to work on a mechanical drive, due to seek reduction, and maximising transfer throughput from disk buffer to memory. Without the seek penalty, I wonder where the gain comes from. SSD's are starting to look like a nearly there technology, though price currently keeps SLC SSD's out of reach of mass market, and the MLC drives would seem to have 'wear' and performance issues, for anything but a ReadMostly filesystem. SuSE's had innserv(8) for yonks, and it parrallelised in older version, but I saw somewhere this actually wasn't having much effect, due to the processes thrashing on disk i/o. Presumably with quad CPUs, and SSDs getting more affordable, then the enabling technology needs to be re-enabled. Anyway perhaps Novell would care to send Intel X25's http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Intel-x25-m-SSD,review-31316.html and Velociraptors http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/hdd-terabyte-1tb,review-31437-7.html to us for Christmas to enable further investigation of this important topic? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
Am Montag, 22. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rob OpenSuSE:
Why would readahead by a significant benefit with an SSD though? It's going to work on a mechanical drive, due to seek reduction, and maximising transfer throughput from disk buffer to memory. Without the seek penalty, I wonder where the gain comes from.
The difference is in the kernel. Normal boot does read 100 bytes of A, calc some bits, read 200 more bytes of A, read 100 bytes of B, calc some bits, read the rest of A and open C, calc some bits, .... And then 10 different processes do that. Now readahead (or preload as the SUSE's tool is named) changes this to: read A, B and C and calc 10 bits. You get much more throughput - from any kind of disc, but you won't get to 5s with real discs ;(
SuSE's had innserv(8) for yonks, and it parrallelised in older version, but I saw somewhere this actually wasn't having much effect, due to the processes thrashing on disk i/o. Presumably with quad CPUs, and SSDs getting more affordable, then the enabling technology needs to be re-enabled.
It is enabled. It helps quite a bit actually. Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
2008/12/23 Stephan Kulow
Am Montag, 22. Dezember 2008 schrieb Rob OpenSuSE:
Why would readahead by a significant benefit with an SSD though? It's going to work on a mechanical drive, due to seek reduction, and maximising transfer throughput from disk buffer to memory. Without the seek penalty, I wonder where the gain comes from.
The difference is in the kernel. Normal boot does read 100 bytes of A, calc some bits, read 200 more bytes of A, read 100 bytes of B, calc some bits, read the rest of A and open C, calc some bits, ....
And then 10 different processes do that. Now readahead (or preload as the SUSE's tool is named) changes this to: read A, B and C and calc 10 bits. You get much more throughput - from any kind of disc, but you won't get to 5s with real discs ;(
The block i/o layer, should fetch the blocks, in 4k chunks minimum, and good 'ole reiserfs would pack small files into other blocks, and presumably it'd stay in disk cache, reducing i/o for stuff like /etc (shame about the BKL though). Yes, shell scripts are bad for blocking and having to do things in round about ways, parsing stuff in files rather ineffieciently if they're not written well. The old disk scheduler tended not to give processes that had blocked on i/o and now consumed it, a split second to do more i/o with the read head in position, so the arm would move back and forth as well. Ubuntu's readahead, paused boot up noticeably, did a whole lot of reading of files, and then started the system up. Which overall was much quicker than their system without doing the readahead enabling. May be they've improved it a lot, I haven't looked this year. The SUSE version is much, much better!!! Nice work, I couldn't even notice it.
SuSE's had innserv(8) for yonks, and it parrallelised in older version, but I saw somewhere this actually wasn't having much effect, due to the processes thrashing on disk i/o. Presumably with quad CPUs, and SSDs getting more affordable, then the enabling technology needs to be re-enabled.
It is enabled. It helps quite a bit actually.
That was a comment by a team working for another distro, looking into boot times, may be the organisation of /etc was more of a bottle neck for them. I've defended the way SUSE oraganised things before on technical grounds, against 'gripers' who made claims, based on net meme's rather than looking at how the scripts worked, what you could and could not do. Yanno, ppl who believe you *must* use YaST. At one time I had to tweak a number, last time I looked I didn't find anything, so wasn't sure, and I really ought to have said "re-enabled if it is not" rather than leave the sentence where I did. Thank you for your time, and the clarification! :) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
Rajko M. wrote:
Not long time ago, I posted to project mail list question is it possible to boot in a 5 seconds, like described in: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=869&num=1
and here is the article that explains what to do. http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
It is not cookbook, but gives ideas.
If you're looking to boot really really fast, LinuxBIOS is also something to look into. http://www.coreboot.org/ "3 seconds to Linux console". /Per Jessen, Zürich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
On Monday 22 December 2008 04:35:34 am Per Jessen wrote:
Rajko M. wrote:
Not long time ago, I posted to project mail list question is it possible to boot in a 5 seconds, like described in: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=869&num=1
and here is the article that explains what to do. http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
It is not cookbook, but gives ideas.
If you're looking to boot really really fast, LinuxBIOS is also something to look into. http://www.coreboot.org/
"3 seconds to Linux console".
That would be next step, but only on machine that has recovery option from bad BIOS update. -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
Per Jessen wrote:
Rajko M. wrote:
Not long time ago, I posted to project mail list question is it possible to boot in a 5 seconds, like described in: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=869&num=1
and here is the article that explains what to do. http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
It is not cookbook, but gives ideas.
If you're looking to boot really really fast, LinuxBIOS is also something to look into. http://www.coreboot.org/
"3 seconds to Linux console".
/Per Jessen, Zürich
I've followed the coreboot (linuxbios as-was) development since the early and it is limited to the number of motherboards and chipsets. When I was brave enough some months ago to ask v2 to do a bios operation (either read or dump) on my unsupported motherboard, it obviously threw up an error message, so doesn't warrant serious consideration at present. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Licensed Private Pilot Emeritus IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Specialist, Cricket Coach Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
Sid Boyce wrote:
Per Jessen wrote:
Rajko M. wrote:
Not long time ago, I posted to project mail list question is it possible to boot in a 5 seconds, like described in: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=869&num=1
and here is the article that explains what to do. http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
It is not cookbook, but gives ideas.
If you're looking to boot really really fast, LinuxBIOS is also something to look into. http://www.coreboot.org/
"3 seconds to Linux console".
/Per Jessen, Zürich
I've followed the coreboot (linuxbios as-was) development since the early and it is limited to the number of motherboards and chipsets.
I've also followed it on and off - the current list of supported boards is actually quite long: http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards
When I was brave enough some months ago to ask v2 to do a bios operation (either read or dump) on my unsupported motherboard, it obviously threw up an error message, so doesn't warrant serious consideration at present. Regards Sid.
It depends on your objectives, methinks. If boot up speed is paramount, you _have_ to look at coreboot, IMHO. /Per Jessen, Zürich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
Per Jessen wrote:
Sid Boyce wrote:
Per Jessen wrote:
Rajko M. wrote:
Not long time ago, I posted to project mail list question is it possible to boot in a 5 seconds, like described in: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=869&num=1
and here is the article that explains what to do. http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
It is not cookbook, but gives ideas. If you're looking to boot really really fast, LinuxBIOS is also something to look into. http://www.coreboot.org/
"3 seconds to Linux console".
/Per Jessen, Zürich
I've followed the coreboot (linuxbios as-was) development since the early and it is limited to the number of motherboards and chipsets.
I've also followed it on and off - the current list of supported boards is actually quite long: http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards
When I was brave enough some months ago to ask v2 to do a bios operation (either read or dump) on my unsupported motherboard, it obviously threw up an error message, so doesn't warrant serious consideration at present. Regards Sid.
It depends on your objectives, methinks. If boot up speed is paramount, you _have_ to look at coreboot, IMHO.
/Per Jessen, Zürich
For the future perhaps, but there are still an awful lot that are WIP and still lots missing. No support for any of my kit, 5x 86_64 boxes and 1 x86. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Licensed Private Pilot Emeritus IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Specialist, Cricket Coach Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
participants (5)
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Per Jessen
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Rajko M.
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Rob OpenSuSE
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Sid Boyce
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Stephan Kulow