Booting linux faster
 

Hi Everybody,

I am having a printer server which is booting in 100 seconds and i want to reduce the boot time to within the range of 20-30 seconds.How can i do it?

The kernel size is around 1 MB and it is having a jffs2 filesystem.The device drivers for wireless LAN and bluetooth are loaded as soon as the system boots.

Please give me your valuable suggestions to optimize the boot time of my printer server.

Thanks,
Ravi Chobey

Hey Rav,
How many services are you running that aren't needed? What I mean is, is your box functioning as a NTP server, DHCP server, ftp server... you don't need any of these. Disabling as many services as you can with keeping the functionality you wish to have.

You may also want to remove anything that updates ldconfig or font matrix's.

Also if you wish to play around with threads.. you can add "&" to some of the processes to allow a quicker boot. But be careful not to start a process that depends on another process that is not finished loading.

Display the startup messages (i.e. turning off any graphic splash screen) and observe them as they whiz by. Notice when they pause, because you probably have some kind of timeout happening.

You also need to distinguish between "the time it takes the kernel to initialize," and "the time that it takes for (user-land...) subsystems to be ready for use."

You will learn what you need to know by watching.

I have a system that boots in six seconds flat.

Generic recommendations for all distros:

1) Disable startup services that you don't need. Or keep only those that you do need.

2) If you use lilo, use the 'compact' option in lilo.conf.

3) Compile a custom kernel. You should do this last, because it has the least effect on boot time, I would estimate only a few seconds.

I agree that you can create a distro as the best choice as H_TeXMeX_H suggests.

Might look at something like xpud that has been setup a bit for fast boot and see if you can use it as a base if you don't want to do a complete from scratch.


100 seconds seems long.

Can a text based distro work like some old floppy type distro?

Might look at suse studio and make a just enough to test.

Thanks for your support. I will check it after stopping the unnecessary services and try to use a tool called "kernel profiler".