bobpeers -> blog

I have the 64 bit version of Fedora 12 installed into a virtual machine and the boot times are terrible. By terrible I mean anywhere from 45 seconds to just over a minute.

I’ve cut the starting services right back to the basics and set it to autologin but it still takes ages. It seems that even getting to udev takes considerably longer than it used to, plus there’s a very noticeable delay before X starts and the desktop is displayed.

For comparison my Fedora 11 machine (32 bit) running the same services regularly boot in 23 to 30 seconds.

It could be to do with the virtual machine since I has to create an xorg.conf due to a problem with Virtualbox guest additions and Fedora 12 but I doubt that’s the sole cause. I did read a bug report about probing for the floppy drive but that’s not my problem.

I’ll just hope that either a new version of Virtualbox or a future Fedora 12 update fixes this.

After reading this article on optimizations made to Ubunbtu 9.10 in relation to the boot time I thought I would check this out in a virtual machine.

I understand that much of the work done will help when booting from an SSD drive and using a virtual machine adds an extra layer between the OS and the bare metal but I though it would be interesting to compare the boot time to Fedora 11, that I also have installed in a VM.

Setting Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 and Fedora 11 up in identical virtual machines, both set to auto login with bootchart installed I was very surprised by the results.

Ubuntu booted in between 1 minute and 1 minute 6 seconds while Fedora 11 booted in between 32 and 34 seconds. This is by no means a controlled test and Ubuntu is still in alpha status but I was pretty shocked by the results. Hopefully by it’s release it will be booting in the sub 30 seconds range.

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.