Here is a quick report on how I was able to speed up the boot in Lenny
by using the tools available already. I was able to reduce the boot
time as reported by bootchart from 48 to 30 seconds (37.5%). I post
it here to make more Debian users aware of the possibilities.
This test was done on a freshly bought Thinkpad X installed with the
Desktop task in Lenny. I started by installing bootchart and doing a
baseline benchmark to see how much time the default boot used.
Bootchart reported 48 seconds.
Next, I went through these steps to speed up the boot:
(1) Installed dash, and ran 'dpkg-reconfigure dash' to enable it as
/bin/sh.
(2) Installed readahead, and touched /etc/readahead/profile-once to
get it to profile the boot on the next boot.
(3) Installed insserv, and ran 'dpkg-reconfigure insserv' to enable
dependency based boot sequencing and reorder the boot sequence.
(4) Fixed the typo in /etc/init.d/rc reported in bug #481770 to make
it possible to enable concurrent boot and shutdown. Enabled
concurrent boot and shutdown by doing
echo CONCURRENCY=startpar >> /etc/default/rcS
This one depend on dependency based boot being enabled.
(5) Disabled init.d/hwclock* during boot after verifying that
"UTC=yes" was active in /etc/default/rcS, and knowing that the
kernel would set the clock from the BIOS clock during boot on
this machine. I disabled it by removing /etc/rcS.d/*hwclock*
after verifying that there was still stop symlinks left in rc0.d
and rc6.d.
After these steps were taken, I rebooted the machine once to do the
profile run for readahead, and then did a benchmark run to see the new
boot time. It was down to 30 seconds, a 37.5% boot time reduction. I
do not know which of these steps contributed to what amount of
reduction. Did not have time to do that testing before I had to
return the laptop to its owner. :)
Another second would have been possible to shave off if I had upgraded
to the latest portmap package in unstable which drop a useless 1
second sleep during boot (patch in #412636). It also give a problem
during shutdown due to #483102/#483172, so I do not recommend
upgrading portmap until those issues are fixed.
I am not quite sure what to do to reduce it even further. Anyone got
any ideas?
Happy hacking,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
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