SoC boot project weekly summary week #3/14

[Bas Zoetekouw]

Hi Petter!

You wrote:

> [Carlos Villegas]
> > This third week I looked at the woody, sarge and etch releases from
> > Debian. They were installed with KDE (with autologin) and
> > bootchart. The results were 32 sec for woody, 44 sec for sarge and
> > 34 sec for Etch ...(sid results go here)... Nevertheless, it seems
> > that bootchart stops logging before you're actually logged in to
> > KDE.
> 
> How do these numbers compare to wall-clock measurements from the grub
> menu until KDE is ready?  How much of the boot process is not
> accounted for?  I expected the boot times for a desktop boot to be
> much larger, so the numbers surprise me.

I think on typical desktop systems (at least on mine), lots of time is
used in setting up lvm and mounting (large) disks.  Any way that could
be measured too? (e.g., compare boot speed with a large reiserfs, ext2/3,
xfs or vfat partition)

> > Nevertheless, I didn't keep any log of the installation procedure
> > while just accepting all the default configuration (except for using
> > always KDE). I'll keep a log on the future to evaluate and
> > understand the difference in boot times.
> 
> Great.  It would be interesting to hear if others installing the same
> profile see similar numbers, or if your results are tied to your
> hardware in some way.

I'm not sure the DE starting should be counted at all.  The main issue
at hand is the boot itself, right?  I think Gnome and KDE have their own
benchmarks and ways to increase log in times...

> > Besides, I looked at the SUSE, Mandriva and Fedora distributions to
> > analyse their boot process. The most interesting so far has been
> > SUSE being LSB compliant and having insserv/startpar to set and
> > ajust the dependencies for parallalel booting.
> 
> Right.  I believe we should all push to get all init.d scripts in
> Debian to provide such dependency information as well.  I've submitted
> a few bug reports to fix it, but there are lots of packages left.

Agreed.  I didn't know that providing the dependency info was already
possible in Debian.  Is it documented somewhere (policy, dev reference)?  

> One thing I believe rcorder and FreeBSD does correct is to calculate
> the order at boot time.  If it does not give an unreasonable speed
> impact, I believe it is best to let the boot order be dynamic instead
> of requiring all packages with init.d scripts to run a program to
> update the boot order (like insserv).  Only if it does slow the boot
> down considerably, it is better to do it every time init.d is updated.

I totally agree.  I don't know how hard a problem it is to calculate the
dependencies, though, and we do need to keep slower machines in mind.

-- 
Kind regards,
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| Bas Zoetekouw              | GPG key: 0644fab7                     |
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| bas at o2w.nl, bas at debian.org |              a2b1 2bae e41f 0644 fab7 |
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