bobpeers -> blog

After posting about my experiences trying to decrease my own boot times it was interesting to read this LWN.net article about two Intel developers getting Fedora to boot on the Asus EEE PC in under 5 seconds.

One item I found very relevant to my own experience was that they stopped the setroubleshootd service from starting as it took 5 seconds. Using both the Fedora and the vanilla kernel, stopping setroubleshootd shaved 4 seconds off my boot time, so now the vanilla 2.6.26.5 kernel boots in 29 seconds and the Fedora kernel in 39.

Of course not may people are going to go to these lengths to boot in 5 seconds but what matters is that they have shown it is possible and it sets a focus on the issues which will inevitably filter down to ‘normal’ users such as myself.

Looking at the Fedora 10 feature list a couple of things caught my eye. A rather significant one, for new users especially, is /sbin sanity whereby /bin and /sbin will be added to the PATH for all users. This will certainly help people when they see commands such as this on a website and cut and paste it into a terminal expecting it to work:

service httpd start

Of course this doesn’t work out of the box in current Fedora releases (it’s /sbin/service). It’s a small change but will make Fedora a bit more users friendly for new users.

Another notable one is Better Start-up that aims to reduce boot times on Fedora. I’m really glad to see that a lot of effort is being put into this area and I know Ubuntu are doing the same.

There were some interesting tests done on Phoronix (see the Fedora and Ubuntu comparisons) comparing boot times over releases for Fedora and Ubuntu. As well as having a much faster boot time it seems that Ubuntu has been better at improving performance over each release, I hope Fedora can rectify this over the next couple of releases.

If, like me, you are experimenting setting up usb drives as bootable Linux devices then you’ll find that after installing grub on the drive just deleting all the files will not remove grub. You need to completely wipe the Master Boot Record (MBR). Assuming your drive is located at /dev/sdb use this command as root:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1

Be very careful to do this on the correct drive! One error and you will wipe the MBR on your main hard drive leaving your computer unable to boot.