[Debian-eeepc-devel] 13 second boot documentation and why is udev so slow...

[Santi Béjar]

2009/6/23 Jelle de Jong <jelledejong at powercraft.nl>:
> Hi all,
>
> The new kernel 2.6.30-1-686 came into Debian this last week and I got
> the itches to do some fast boot testing. The result is still
> disappointing for me, its still the same as a year back and the kernel
> even got slower compared to 2.6.29-2-486 but there are some good points.

The rest of the system is lenny, testing or sid? I suspect that it is
lenny. In particular, module-init-tools from lenny is very slow, the
one from testing is much faster.

>
> The parallel booting of script kind of works now. I added my results to
> the wiki I hope that's ok:
> http://wiki.debian.org/BootProcessSpeedup#Testsresultsofusers

I think it kind of works because you use readahead, but I'm not sure
that it helps (both with readahead and/or parallel booting). In my 701
the main bottleneck is the CPU, not the harddisk, and looking at your
bootchart figure I suspect that it also happens to you.

> major issues:
> the udev process takes an awful lot of time it just stays for more then
> 7 seconds in the "Waiting for /dev to be fully populated" state probably
> caused by udevadm settle. We need to tune udev to become way faster and
> keep the solution easy to use and maintainable.

Try udev and module-init-tools from testing/sid (both have speed
enhancements since lenny).
.
>
> sometimes my asus eeepc 901 just won't turn off at the last stages of
> halt. I got the feeling that some hardware (audio, network) is not
> correctly deinitialized and makes the shutdown process hang. SySRq
> doesn't react in this stage anymore so the kernel is probably down already.

I've heard histories like this but I don't remember the cause, but I
thought it was fixed. But nevertheless it is another issue, so you
could post it as another mail, search the web or report it to the BTS.

HTH,
Santi