Optimizing boot time on my laptop

[lotharz0r]

Hi.
I have recently made the switch to ubuntu from Gentoo.
I have been using Gentoo for about 5 years, and I love it, but I decided to try Ubuntu because it's easy to use and because I wont have to compile apps if I want to install something.

I installed Kubuntu, but I am not that found of KDE, so I installed XFCE which I like very much. I like it fast and simple, i used fluxbox on my gentoo installation.

Overall Ubuntu seems like a good OS, good HW support and very easy to use, but maybe a little complicated to optimize and customize.

The performance of the fully booted system is good enough.
I only use the terminal, firefox and sometimes Thunar and rdesktop, but what annoys me is the slow boot.

Questions:

• What can I do to reduce the system boot time? Is there any apps I can use to disable stuff I dont need, or some configuration I can do to make it faster? I have disabled stuff like bluetooth and kdm, but it was not of much help.
  
• In gentoo I used to make my own kernels, but it was way to much work to get it to work imho. Is there any tools I can use to make my own kernel with only support for the drivers I need to make it faster?

[Peter09]

If you disable the splash option (nosplash) in the grub menu at startup. (hit esc at the grub prompt, select the 2nd line and type E to edit it) You can see the boot sequence, it may give you an idea as to where it is slow.

[swoody]

I've always been interested in optimizing my laptop as well. Either bootup time, battery life (now 8hrs), or just making things work smoother. I've accumulated quite a few bookmarks along the way, so I'm hoping these will help you out on your quest

http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/article...9454355,00.htm
http://its-about-amoena.blogspot.com...rt-faster.html
http://www.openfirmware.info/Welcome_to_OpenBIOS
http://sayakb.blogspot.com/search/label/MakeFast

I have a ton of different ones as well, so let me know if you'd like more info about extending your battery life or just making Ubuntu snappier!

[lotharz0r]

Thanks for the links. I'll look through them and see if there's anything that helps speeding up the system.


If I boot without splash and remove the quiet option I see that the system boot stops for several seconds after loading the USB mass storage driver.
If I only remove quiet, and still have splash it stops for several seconds with the message "Waiting for root filesystem".
Quite annoying.

[_sAm_]

Do you have dual core?

[lotharz0r]

No, its got an 1,6GHz Celeron with 1,5 GB RAM.
I have tried disabling several of the services I dont use, disabling splash and I have set vm_swappiness=10

I have also edited /etc/init.d/rc and changed:
CONCURRENCY=none
to
CONCURRENCY=shell


For some weird reason this resulted in almost 30 seconds slower boot.
Previously my system booted in 57 seconds, now it boots in 1:20.

My system is fully updated with the newest packages.

It still stops and does nothing while the message "waiting for root filesystem" appairs.

I tried changing from UUID to /dev/sdx in /etc/fstab and grubs menu.lst, but it made no difference.

[oldos2er]

CONCURRENCY=shell only works on dual (or more) core CPUs.

[lotharz0r]

Ok. I did change it back since it only increased my boot time.
Any idea why the boot stops for several seconds after loading the USB mass storage driver?

As mentioned it says "Waiting for root file system" when I've got splash on and quiet off.

[ScottHW]

... I have disabled stuff like bluetooth and kdm, but it was not of much help.

I am also interested in both saving battery life, and increasing boot time. Could you describe in a little more detail how you "disabled" that stuff?

I've seen this older thread with commands to stop Bluetooth once it's running, but that certainly doesn't do any good for boot times...
Turn off bluetooth radio
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=120403

[ScottHW]

Oh, and last week I saw a link to this fascinating site:
LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds
http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

The quote is brilliant,
"It's not about booting faster, it's about booting in 5 seconds"
- Arjan van de Ven, Linux developer at Intel and author of PowerTOP