Boot time tuning chapter 4th: Reliability

Hey,

today I'm making a little step back but another forward. I mean that in the last tuning chapter I was enthusiastic of my 9 sec boot time, even knowing I was on the edge of the blade. Actually nothing bad has happened, I was even able to cut away another second.

I did optimize booting levels and made some order in my xorg.conf. Maybe some little extra is given by the latest xorg version, which I installed in these days. At the very end of my optimization I was able to boot in 8s... but sometimes I was not able to boot. So here is the detailed story.

Boot time tuning chapter third: fastest boot ever 9s

Hey there. Amazing. I just got an incredible result. Boot time under 10s. I found a way to real optimization and full use of my box power. You can see my latest bootchart graph here. The steps are really painless but beware the result might be a not booting machine.

Please notice that the machine is not a micro-kernel eeePC or netbook or embedded device. It's a Core2Duo, 4GB Ram, OCZ Vertex serie SSD Laptop, MSI PR201, hand assembled and customized, but still a common PC.

The first ingredient of our soup will be OpenRC, seen few posts ago.

The rest is some luck (as it never hurts) and some risk-taking hand-made modifies.

Boot time tuning chapter second: OpenRC

Yesterday we saw how to install bootchart and understand what's in its report image. Today we are going to make a small step for a user but a big step for your box: install OpenRC.

Your box works with baselayout1:

"Originally Gentoo's rc system was built into baselayout 1 and written entirely in bash. This led to several limitations. For example, certain system calls need to be accessed during boot and this required C-based callouts to be added. These callouts were each statically linked, causing the rc system to bloat over time. [...] This led to a development of baselayout 2, which is written in C and only requires a POSIX-compliant shell. During the development of baselayout 2, it was determined that it was a better fit if baselayout merely provided the base files and filesystem layout for Gentoo and the rc system was broken off into its own package. Thus we have OpenRC.

OpenRC is primarily developed by Roy Marples and supports all current Gentoo variations (i.e. Gentoo Linux, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Gentoo Embedded, and Gentoo Vserver) and other platforms such as FreeBSD and NetBSD." Taken from Gentoo Handbook

Boot time tuning chapter first: bootchart

"Jack gets up and lights a cigarette. Then he turns his laptop on and go to the kitchen to have a coffee cup, a toast and he comes back to his freshly opened desktop..."

Sounds familiar? Tired of a boot up that takes ages? Here come some advices on how you can squeeze some blood out of your gentoo box (or at least improve performances). Obviously I'm not going to talk about Windoze...If you have a Win box, I'll give a good tip: move to Xubuntu and enjoy Open Source!

We are going to introduce bootchartd, used as a tool to monitor timings, and OpenRC, that's actually what makes the difference. Advanced users can find a way to start avoiding login managers using a mingetty autologin.

At last a link to a fresh, shiny and beautiful splashscreen (Powered by Gentoo) to beautify your startup.

In this first chapter I'll treat bootchart installation and configuration. The rest is coming up soon.