It seems boot performance is a hot topic these days. Reducing boot time is also one of the goals for Jaunty Jakalope (Jaunty is already showing good results) and will improve even further with Karmic Koala. Mandriva however has a slightly different approach to reduce boot time called Speedboot.
Speedboot is a specific boot time mode on a standard Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring where graphical system is started as early. This mode allows users to interact with their system much earlier than it was possible before, so they don't feel frustrated because their system isn't ready yet.
In Speedboot mode, some tasks are done very early in the boot process, other are delayed after graphical display manager has been displayed, and some tasks are ignored completely.
Speedboot has been designed to be transparent for our users : if system meets some criterias (not using network based authentication, not using encrypted partitions, ...), speedboot will be automatically enabled and used, with a fallback mechanism, in the event display manager could not be started properly, so standard (ie slow) boot would still be used to start display manager (for instance, if you boot on a new kernel and your dkms driver haven't been rebuilt yet). Of course, users will also have the possibility to completely disable speedboot if they don't like it.
The project is still in it's initial phase, but if you want to know more about Bootspeed you can read Frédéric Crozat' detailed explanation about bootspeed here.
More info on the Mandriva wiki: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.1-speedboot
Source: Frédéric Crozat
This is another way of looking at speeding up boot times on linux, but it sort of make me think about Windows. XP and Vista show their desktop before everything is started. In real live this does not always mean that you can start working when the desktop is there. Therefore I favore to have fast boot times with all services started and way maybe a few seconds more and really get to work.
ReplyDeleteI rather favour waiting a few seconds more and have all my services started and really go to work. Mandriva has another way of speeding up linux boot times, but this reminds me of the way that Vista and XP start. Show the desktop, but not all services completed yet. When needing a not completed services (network?) then you can't get to work afterall :-(
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