[Petter Reinholdtsen] > Today a new package to speed up the boot is available in unstable. > The readahead binary package can speed up the boot quite significantly > by optimizing how the hard drive is used. It make sure the kernel > disk cache is populated as the very first thing done at boot with the > files used during boot. To test it, install readahead, boot once with > 'profile' as a kernel option to tune it to your boot, and then boot > normally.
Should we include this feature in the default installation for lenny? I know some work is going on to make a more dynamic solution, <URL:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Prefetch>, but while we wait for that to stabilize, I believe the readahead solution improve the boot times quite a lot. If we also manage to switch to dash as the default /bin/sh, the impact should be significant. The readahead package made it into testing today, so it is available for a larger number of testers. Currently only 0.1% of the population have it installed. > It should not be used with preload (or at least, the profiling > should never be done when preload is enabled), as it will make > readahead believe that all the files loaded by preload are used > during boot, and thus waste time and kernel disk cache on files only > needed after the boot. I'll try to find a way to avoid this problem with the interaction with the preload package. One idea is to make sure preload start after the readahead-watch program is stopped. > I welcome benchmarks on the initscripts-ng-devel mailing list, > <URL:http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/initscripts-ng-devel>. Very much so. :) The ones I have seen so far reported of 10% speedup, and one report on slowdown. Not quite sure what is the problem with the one reporting a slowdown. To benchmark, use the bootchart package, and boot with init=/sbin/bootchartd. Happy hacking, -- Petter Reinholdtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]