Boot-time improvements

Timo Jyrinki timo.jyrinki at gmail.com
Fri Sep 12 07:33:33 UTC 2008


2008/9/12 Chris Jones <chrisjones at comcen.com.au>:
> the mailing list here. So, as a test, I timed my own system how long it
> takes to boot. From GRUB boot to login screen, it was 36.72 secs. And
> that is on a Celeron D with 512MB DDR RAM and booting from an old IDE
> hard drive. I'd imagine that a more recent dual core setup with more ram
> and a more recent sata hard drive would have better results. But my mere
> 36 secs is certainly nothing to rant about.

One problem is that the dual core setups do not help that much because
the bottle-neck is in hard drives which haven't gotten speedier at all
in the last 15 years regarding seek times, and even transfer speeds
are relatively slowly increasing compared to other aspects. Especially
dual-core laptops are largely as slow to boot as desktop computers
from 2-5 years ago, because of the slower hard disks.

The other problem is that logging into GNOME often takes the same time
it takes from GRUB to GDM.

The aim would be IMHO something like 15-20s from GRUB to GNOME desktop
on a modern _laptop_ computer, with smooth transitions.

-Timo




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