Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 6:42 PM, Olav Vitters <olav at vitters.nl> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 03:14:01PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
>> I haven't seen systems that boot in less than 6 seconds (and by "boot" I
>> mean power-on to login prompt).  Maybe they exist, but that is not my
>> experience with common hardware.
>
> At FOSDEM they demonstrated 2 seconds for kernel + userspace. Userspace
> being GDM. The initialization of the presenter took longer than the
> kernel+userspace bit, so they had to use a camera to actually show this.
> The firmware on that laptop took about 7 seconds. As Lennart mentioned
> elsewhere, new laptops must do less than 2 seconds to get that nice
> Windows logo, some do 0.5 seconds.
>
> So laptop booting to GDM in 2.5 - 4 seconds after pressing the power
> button is realistic.
>
> 350MB video of the presentation:
> http://video.fosdem.org/2013/maintracks/Janson/systemd,_Two_Years_Later.webm
>
> The demonstration is at the beginning.

It's unfortunately demoware. While the LinuxBIOS project has optimized
BIOS on a few systrems, server grade hardware can take up to five
minutes simply to get past all the Power-On-Self-Test operations. And
just because the "Windows logo" is up does not mean the system is
actually for another few minutes, while slow and but unreported
operations go on unknown to the user, operations that may prevent
normal login. These include hard drive indexing, VPN activation, DHCP
configuration in a not-well-configured network environment, etc.

It's not "up" until the user is logged in or critical background
services, such as web servers or file servers, are up and available
for service, and that takes much more than showing that icon. Fedora
18 is suffering similar issues with the new Gnome interface: login is
now *slow* with overwhelming clusters of undesired and unhelpful
graphical clutter.