IDEA: Shortening boot-time

[Russell Coker]

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 02:23, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hans de Goede (j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl) said:
> > -remove starting of prefdm from inittab and make it a service
>
> Doesn't work correctly without console tricks (if *dm starts
> before *getty, it will take one of the terminals allocated
> for the getty.)  But that probably can be worked around.

It would be good to have *dm use a statically allocated VT.  Otherwise if you 
have a need to change the number of getty's then you may end up conflicting 
with a running *dm until the next reboot.

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 05:28, Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 03:16:50PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > The last time this was tried, the total speedup was on the order of
> > 10% or so. Perhaps it's changed, but it wasn't a extreme speedup.
>
> Yeah, I remember that. But hey, I'll take 10%. And it's probably somewhat
> more on SMP and hyperthreading system.

RAID would probably have more potential to improve the speed, system boot 
scripts don't tend to do much CPU use.  CPU speed is also increasing faster 
than hard disk speed, so the dependency on drive speed will probably become 
more of an issue.

Last time I did some tests on Linux software RAID I found that it was lacking 
in this regard.  I would have hoped to see some read benchmarks showing that 
a RAID-1 with two disks is nearly twice as fast as a single disk, however I 
didn't find any test that showed such a result or anything close to it.  
Optimising the read performance of Linux software RAID is one thing that can 
be done to improve such things (and generally improve all Linux performance).

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 10:35, Denis Leroy <denisleroy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Boy that's a narrow view. How about laptop users ? I reboot my laptop
> all the time, I can't switch from single to dual screens without it.

The solution to this problem is to remove the need for the reboot.  I don't 
think that anything more than restarting *dm should be needed for such a 
change.

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