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

[Tomaž Šolc]

Hi Phil

> 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:

Is there any use for the PC speaker support on Eee? I can't find any way
to hear its beeps on my 701.

> I'm unsure why portmap and rpc.statd are not postponed until after 
> xdm had started; I'll look in to that.

I think that insserv starts a service as soon as possible. On my system
dependencies for gdm go like this:

syslog -> dbus -> hal -> gdm

And for ssh:

syslog -> ssh

So insserv schedules ssh to start together with dbus, while it would
probably be better to schedule it parallel to gdm. I guess the situation
is similar with portmap.

As far as I know you can only change this by changing the dependencies
of init scripts.

> 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

With gdm I measured 8s between "starting gdm." is printed and the login
prompt.

Best regards
Tomaž