Boot Charting

[Nick Rhodes]

Just for fun I ran bootchart on Jaunty on my laptop. This is is 100% vanilla install clean install on XFS (separate /boot, / and /home partitions, mounted with deadline elevator).
And this is my boot chart: http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/166/riverjaunty200905041.png.

15s is rather slick.

There is some info for ubuntu users: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BootCharting

[demonon]

So is that 15 seconds from the moment you select Ubuntu in Grub to when you can login?

[Nick Rhodes]

So first tweak.

Reprofile. This causes readahead to reorganise itself for your specific machine/OS. Simply added the word "profile" to the end of kernel boot flags on reboot. Then rebooted again to get a new chart.

This has reduced my boot by 1s, down to 14s: http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/6830/riverjaunty200905042.png

[Nick Rhodes]

-{ Quote: "So is that 15 seconds from the moment you select Ubuntu in Grub to when you can login?" }-

Yes :)

[lodore]

any particular reason for using XFS?

[Nick Rhodes]

-{ Quote: "any particular reason for using XFS?" }-

For my usage patterns I find XFS (and EXT4) faster than EXT3.
I find with tweaked FS creation and mount flags its as good as EXT3 for normal desktop usage and manages my media files, virtual machines, backup images that added upto 300gb of largish files far better than EXT3. I also found with lots of creation and deletion of many virtual disks for all the distros I was trying, that EXT3 performance was degrading, I suspect combination of mild fragmentation and inefficiencies of handling large files.
I chose XFS over EXT4 because it a more stable/proven filesystem (bugs that XFS fixed years ago, EXT4 is suffering from.
Also over past year or so XFS has had a lot of optimisation and refactoring, which leads to leaner more efficient code than ever, XFS is really continuing to be actively developed.
In 6 months time I may change to EXT4 when it is tried and tested and gained enough support.

[Alphalutra1]

-{ Quote: "
I find with tweaked FS creation and mount flags " }-
I was wondering what options you used for mkfs.xfs and what mount flags you used? I used a 128m log and set lazy-count to one and mount it with noatime, nodiratime, and logbufs=8 and still get pretty absymal performance on small files. Everything else it works wonderfully for though. Maybe you have some other tweaks to help it along with the small files?

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

[Searching_ _ _]

-{ Quote: "Coreboot (http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot) is a "free software" (i.e. GPL) BIOS replacement for x86-based computers. Using Coreboot it is possible (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuzRsXKm_NQ) to turn a computer on and have the graphic environment up and running in 6 seconds. And it does a better job of configuring the hardware than most stock BIOS software." }-
http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/dotorg/coreboot

[demonon]

I have a 24 second boot time for what I think is a good PC. Q6600 CPU and 3 gig ram.
Is my boot "slow" because I installed GRUB to my "/" partition?
I also have a home and swap partition on a second external HD. First I have allocated 250 GB to Vista. next I have a 10GB ext4 partition for Ubuntu Jaunty x64 and then I have another NTFS partition.
24 seconds is a huge improvement compared to Vista, but I still would like to know how to boot in just 15 seconds.
Here is my bootchart: http://i41.tinypic.com/jzfl9w.png

Regards,

-demonon.

[Nick Rhodes]

Demonon,

Bootcharting starts after grub has run, so would not be a factor.

FYI putting swap partition on an external drive is a performance killer IF your swap file is used, but also could be one of the reasons for your slow boot, because the modules to control the external drive are needed just to swapon and mount /home.

I noticed quite a few hdparm's going on which I do not have, any idea why they are running ?

I do not think it matters too much that you have Vista on your primary drive, but if you can, I would try and put /home and swap on the same drive and see how quick your machine will boot without your external hdd.

Cheers, Nick.