[SOLVED] Triying to boot faster. Grub's taking too long

matiasar · 01-26-2012, 07:53 AM

Hi.
I'm trying to make an old PIII box to boot as fast as possible. I'm planning to use it as a headless (no monitor, no GUIs) music player, based on mpd.

I found that Grub (tried the current Grub2 and legacy Grub) is taking to long to start. In the stage "Loading Grub" or "Grub Loading Stage1.5" (Grub-Legacy) takes almost 10 seconds.

Does anybody know if there is a way to turn grub faster in this old hardware? Any other suggestion?
I'm using Debian Squeeze.

Thanks in advance,
Matías

H_TeXMeX_H · 01-26-2012, 08:47 AM

Grub is very fast. If you want you can try using lilo with the 'compact' option, but it may not help

One way it speed it up is reduce the size of the kernel ... remove unneeded junk that is built-in. Only build in what you need to boot, the filesystem drivers and the IDE/SATA/AHCI drivers.

Also disable startup services that you don't need.

DavidMcCann · 01-26-2012, 11:34 AM

If you're using Debian, I presume you're using System V init scripts. You can speed booting a bit by using
systemd: in Fedora, Suse, Mageia; Debian is opposed to it
or
upstart: in Ubuntu; may be in the Debian repository

matiasar · 01-26-2012, 02:43 PM

Thanks for your kind replies fellows.
Finally I improved Grub (I stick with legacy) speed using "profile" boot option. That appeared to had improved speed.

Today, I compile my own kernel, extracting lot of things I won't use.
I was wondering if is possible to use the uncompressed kernel image (vmlinux) in order to reduce decompression time in boot up. I tried it, googled a little bit, but I think that's no possible...

About SysV that's a good idea I think I'll give it a try.

Regards.

jefro · 01-26-2012, 04:45 PM

I'd think you may not need grub. Lilo may be fine.

H_TeXMeX_H · 01-27-2012, 01:56 AM

If you think the CPU is not fast enough when decompressing, use the 'lzo' compression for the kernel, that should speed it up.

If the RAM is slow you want better compression than gz or lzo, so I would maybe use xz in that case. If both are slow, there's not much to do.

matiasar · 01-27-2012, 06:31 AM

TexMex,

That's very interesting. I'll do some test.
I'm quite new to kernel compilling, I think compression type is selected in make menuconfig "kernel compression mode".
I was using gzip, so I'll test with lzma.

"xz" seems no to appear there. Should I need a particular package in order to use that compression algorithm?

H_TeXMeX_H · 01-27-2012, 06:44 AM

xz is only available in recent kernels I think.

matiasar · 01-27-2012, 02:03 PM

Thanks a lot.
I recompiled my kernel image using lzma, final size was almost 300 kb smaller. No big difference in decompression time, may be a couple of seconds, previously I was using gzip.
Yes, as I'm dealing with quite old hardware I decided to use version 2.6.32.55.

Was worth for learning a little on kernel compilation. Regards.