HOWTO: Reducing boot time in Breezy using InitNG

[mathjazz]

VMWare stopped working for me. I receive an error message, telling me to make sure that kernel module "vmmon" is loaded.

Any hints?

[Heliode]

Thanks for your very well worded and easy-to-use howto, temcat. I've tried it in a virtual machine first, and it worked perfectly, turning a 53 second boottime into a 38 second one. This encouraged me to try it on my two physical machines (laptop and workstation)

They were both largely successful, but it seems a few modules fail to load. On my laptop, my wireless card isn't loaded at all. (the device isn't initialized, I don't see it in network management or with 'ifconfig -a')

On my workstation, there seems to be a problem with Portmapper. I have a couple of NFS shares in my fstab which I automatically mount at boottime. With InitNG however, they don't. When I try to mount them manually, it takes a really, really long time (like 5 minutes per mount). This led me to conclude a problem with portmap. However, I've added 'portmap' to both 'default' and 'system' runlevels, but in both cases NFS mounts don't seem to mount at boot time.
I also have the problem with VMWare's 'vmmon' kernel module not being loaded, but I believe this to be related to the network card driver on the laptop failing to load (since I had to compile that module manually).
[[Edit: If I do 'sudo /etc/init.d/portmap start' and then do 'mount -a', all my nfs shares are mounted in about three seconds, so the problem is indeed in portmapper not starting]]

Any light you would be able to shed on the situation would be hightly apperciated.

[Heliode]

Ok, I figured out the VMWare part, and made some progress on the other two...

For VMWare:

fist of all, you need to add vmware to the default runlevel with:

sudo ng-update add vmware default

However, there is a path hardcoded in the InitNG config file for VMWare that probably isn't valid, namely the path to the executable 'vmnet-bridge'. To figure out where you have it on your system, open a terminal and type "which vmnet-bridge". For me the path was "/usr/bin/vmnet-bridge".

Now open "/etc/initng/daemon/vmware.i" in your favorite editor. Look for the line that says

exec /opt/vmware/bin/vmnet-bridge /dev/vmnet0 eth0

and replace it with the correct path, which in my example is:

exec /usr/bin/vmnet-bridge /dev/vmnet0 eth0

Also note that if you want vmware to bridge over a device other than eth0, this is the place to change it.

Now reboot, and it should work!

For the laptop wireless interface; it uses the 'rt2500' module, but manually modprobing that after InitNG-bootup doesn't activate the device either, still looking into that.

As for Portmap, the problem seems to be in the '/etc/initng/daemon/portmap.i' file, which says the following:

service daemon/portmap {
        need = system/mountroot virtual/networking
        start {
                [[ -f  /etc/conf.d/portmap]] && . /etc/conf.d/portmap
                /sbin/portmap ${PORTMAP_OPTS}
                # If we don't sleep then applications needing on portmap
                # will not successfully connect
                sleep 5
        }
}

I won't claim to know exactly what this does, but it seems to check if /etc/conf.d/portmap is there, which it isn't. However, even after manually creating this file (and even hashing the check out) portmap stil isn't started. I'd like some help with this from somebody with more experience with this sort of thing than me.

I'll keep you posted

[bradroger]

Step 6 - I get this error:

brad@bradubuntu:~/Downloads$ sudo ng-update add system/colplug system
Warning: "system/colplug" isn't a script or a runlevel, it's being removed from list
Error: you didn't specify any script

Is there something blatantly obvious I skipped or missed or is this a bug?

[bradroger]

oh sorry...I tried it again and got
Success: added "system/coldplug" to runlevel "system"
I'll try to be a little less trigger happy!!

[gluon]

I really love the speed boost given by InitNG, but I'm having a problem with it. When I boot using InitNG, I cannot use Matlab fully.
In the start-up (starting in console-mode), I get following:

$ matlab
/opt/matlab/bin/util/oscheck.sh: line 134: /lib/libc.so.6: Lupa evätty
??? MATLAB was unable to open a pseudo-tty: No such file or directory [2,1]
The unix() and ! commands will not work in this MATLAB session. Other
commands which depend upon unix() and ! will also fail. Your system may
be running low on resources. If the problem persists after a reboot,
check with your system administrator and confirm that your pty subsystem
is properly configured.

Does anyone have an idea how this could be resolved?

[graabein]

Other alternative would be to wait until it gets included in the default install of Ubuntu (I believe making boot process faster was goal for Breezy, but didn't get included, not sure about Dapper, after all its main goal is stability).

EDIT: Of course, unless someone packs this into single script / makes a deb package.

Oh that would be great. A script is perfect. Hope they put a high priority on snappy boot time in Dapper.

[BLTicklemonster]

smootherest linux ever

[parpic2002]

This is my net.i file.



service net/eth0 {
need = system/mountfs system/modules system/hostname system/ifupdown-debian
use = system/static-modules system/coldplug daemon/cardmgr
start = /sbin/ifup
start_args = -a
stop = /sbin/ifdown
stop_args = -a
}

service net/eth1 {
depends = system/initial system/checkroot system/modules
start {
echo "Starting net/eth1 now"
ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.74 netmask 255.255.248.0 broadcast 192.168.1.32
}
stop {
echo "Stopping net/$NAME now"
ifconfig $NAME down
}
}

service net/lo {
# */
need = system/mountfs system/modules system/hostname system/ifupdown-debian
use = system/static-modules system/coldplug
start = /sbin/ifup
start_args = lo
stop = /sbin/ifdown
stop_args = lo
}

service net/* {
# */
need = system/mountfs system/modules system/hostname system/ifupdown-debian
use = system/static-modules system/coldplug daemon/cardmgr
#provide = virtual/networking
start = /sbin/ifup
start_args = $NAME
stop = /sbin/ifdown
stop_args = $NAME
}


Just work ok

[snowpalmer]

I tried to install this on mine. I'm on an amd64 machine so there wasn't a deb but I downloaded the latest source and created a deb by using checkinstall. Everything installed just fine but I get this when it boots.

** "initng_common.c", load_to_active():
08:05:46 -- line:105 FAIL: load_to_active(default): Can't get service!
SEGFAULTED!

Anyone have any dieas? I'm not expert, so I'm pretty stumped. Has anyone successfully used this on a 64 bit system? A comment here sounds like people are using it on amd64.