- <item>
- <title>Debian boots quicker and quicker</title>
- <link>Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Debian_boots_quicker_and_quicker.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description>
-<p>I spent Monday and tuesday this week in London with a lot of the
-people involved in the boot system on Debian and Ubuntu, to see if we
-could find more ways to speed up the boot system. This was an Ubuntu
-funded
-<a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance/DebianUbuntuSprint">developer
-gathering</a>. It was quite productive. We also discussed the future
-of boot systems, and ways to handle the increasing number of boot
-issues introduced by the Linux kernel becoming more and more
-asynchronous and event base. The Ubuntu approach using udev and
-upstart might be a good way forward. Time will show.</p>
-
-<p>Anyway, there are a few ways at the moment to speed up the boot
-process in Debian. All of these should be applied to get a quick
-boot:</p>
-
-<ul>
-
-<li>Use dash as /bin/sh.</li>
-
-<li>Disable the init.d/hwclock*.sh scripts and make sure the hardware
- clock is in UTC.</li>
-
-<li>Install and activate the insserv package to enable
- <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot">dependency
- based boot sequencing</a>, and enable concurrent booting.</li>
-
-</ul>
-
-These points are based on the Google summer of code work done by
-<a href="http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/">Carlos
-Villegas</a>.
-
-<p>Support for makefile-style concurrency during boot was uploaded to
-unstable yesterday. When we tested it, we were able to cut 6 seconds
-from the boot sequence. It depend on very correct dependency
-declaration in all init.d scripts, so I expect us to find edge cases
-where the dependences in some scripts are slightly wrong when we start
-using this.</p>
-
-<p>On our IRC channel for this effort, #pkg-sysvinit, a new idea was
-introduced by Raphael Geissert today, one that could affect the
-startup speed as well. Instead of starting some scripts concurrently
-from rcS.d/ and another set of scripts from rc2.d/, it would be
-possible to run a of them in the same process. A quick way to test
-this would be to enable insserv and run 'mv /etc/rc2.d/S* /etc/rcS.d/;
-insserv'. Will need to test if that work. :)</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-