Linux Plumbers Conference: Booting Linux in five seconds

[Nemesis]

Link to full article

How did they do it? Arjan said it starts with the right attitude. "It's not about booting faster, it's about booting in 5 seconds." Instead of saving a second here and there, set a time budget for the whole system, and make each step of the boot finish in its allotted time. And no cheating. "Done booting means CPU and disk idle," Arjan said. No fair putting up the desktop while still starting services behind the scenes. (An audience member pointed out that Microsoft does this.) The "done booting" time did not include bringing up the network, but did include starting NetworkManager. A system with a conventional hard disk will have to take longer to start up: Arjan said he has run the same load on a ThinkPad and achieved a 10-second boot time.

Now if they can get the various distributions to work to make this or close to it the standard.  It would be great to see those companies shipping Linux on Netbooks do this, a nearly instant on note taker / E-Mail machine.

[Wraith 413]

 It would be great it Windows XP or Vista could be made load this fast.   Anyway, a good job by these guys, digging into the processes that weren't needed and patching a kernel to boot. Some of this is over my head, but I can still appreciate the work applied.

[Bonk]

In my experience, boot time went up with the intorduction of "Plug and Pray" and the proliferation of devices that offload the work that used to be done by hardware to the cpu through drivers (most USB devices being guilty of this).

I like dip switches and jumpers, it gives a physical feel to the system and you know exactly what you'll get, but you can't buy hardware like that anymore.

[SrCpt_SFHQ_XC]

It would be great it Windows XP or Vista could be made load this fast. Anyway, a good job by these guys, digging into the processes that weren't needed and patching a kernel to boot. Some of this is over my head, but I can still appreciate the work applied.

Well so far in my experiments with Windows XP, I have managed to get my boot time down to, not 5 seconds, but less then 30 seconds for sure(I'd say in the area of 15-20). Vista though is a different story, still reduced load time with my laptop(has Vista Ultimate), but it runs a lot more processes then "bare bones" XP boot does

[Capt_Pestalence_XC]

SFHQ.. Give me a week or so and I'll give you a config for Vista to get your boot time under 30 seconds without compromising anything on your system...

I have everything functioal.. but tweaking out services and removing unnecessary Windows utils.. and editing my boot record.. I was able to eliminate the pork out of Vista.. Cold boot time.. approx 26 seconds. And I still have UAC and AERO enabled.. All windows visual effects still in effect and I have outrageous boot time.. have to love it.

Not too bad.. I have about the same time frame for XP running SP 3.

[Nemesis]

SFHQ.. Give me a week or so and I'll give you a config for Vista to get your boot time under 30 seconds without compromising anything on your system...

....

Not too bad.. I have about the same time frame for XP running SP 3.

It would be great to see that written up and posted (for as many versions of Windows as possible).  I'm sure it would be helpful to many of our members.

Maybe you (or someone) should start an "Optimizing Windows" thread.