[Debian-eeepc-devel] Two seconds shaved off kernel boot time by locking fix

[Phil Endecott]

Dear All,

This small kernel patch:
   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.usb.general/9923

fixes the problem where I found that the initialisation of the speaker 
appeared to wait for the initialisation of the mouse to complete, as 
discussed here:
   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.input/5751

This takes my total boot time from the end of grub to the xdm login 
dialog being visible down to 15 seconds.  I have posted a new bootgraph here:
   http://chezphil.org/tmp/bootgraph2.svg

My current bootchart can be seen at:
   http://chezphil.org/tmp/bootchart2.svg

It's clear from this that even my stripped-down udev setup is taking 
some time.  I believe that logsave is hiding an fsck process.  I'm 
unsure why portmap and rpc.statd are not postponed until after xdm had 
started; I'll look in to that.  But there are two really significant 
things still left: the BIOS time (9 seconds I think when I measured it) 
and the X startup.  The bootchart shows Xorg starting at about t=6s, 
but it's another 9s before I see the xdm login dialog.  My 
understanding is that kernel mode-setting is the solution to that.  
Does anyone know about the status of that in Debian?  Is everyone 
seeing approximately this much time spent in X initialisation, or can 
it be improved by Xorg.conf tweaking?


Cheers,  Phil.