Services at Boot + kernel optimization

Vincent Trouilliez vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr
Sat May 28 19:26:31 UTC 2005


> I just read that my AMD processor does not support powernowd so, I removed it.
> Do you agree?

Yes, I have an AMD Athlon XP 1700+, and every time I install Ubuntu, as
it installs this package, I can see on the screen "CPU NOOOT supported".
Yet somehow, it is installed and enabled anyway... go figure :-/

Same for RAID services ('mdadm' script). I don't have any RAID devices,
and so do probably most Ubuntu users, yet it's installed and running
anyway. :-/

Same for PPP.... I don't have a dila-up modem, only Ethernet/DHCP, but
PPP is installed and running anyway... :-(

I like the clean/simple/light-weight design of Ubuntu, but it looks like
it could be made even cleaner, by removing many scripts.
I assume that the less processes/things are running on a machine, the
faster, but more importantly the more reliable and robust it is, no ?
So I think it's a good goal for the Ubuntu installer, to only install
(or at enable) scripts that are useful to the machine.
In the meantime, we have this nice GUI to turn all un-needed scripts
off :-)


> Also, as an addendum, I discovered I was running the i386 kernel.

Yep, that's the default kernel...

> I found the k7 i686 kernel in synaptic under linux-kernel image.
> So, I installed it and now I'm running the optimized kernel. 
> The performance increase is quite remarkable.

Hmmm, I remember, with Warty, trying the i686 and K7 kernels.. never
noticed any difference. What should I look for precisely ? I remember
timing start-up time of OpenOffice, and in all cases, it took 10.5s...
no less no more. Overall reponsiveness of the desktop didn't seem
improved either, not in a sensible/detectable way at least.
But that was with Warty, I upgraded to Hoary recently, I will try the
other kernel again, might be luckier...
When I tried the kernel with Warty, I had 512MB of RAM, 768MB now with
Hoary, maybe that will make difference ??

--
Vince





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