8 second boot

I think there's a bit of room for improvement in the Aspire boot times still!

I'm still using the linpus distro, but booting to the xfce desktop instead of the AAO launch screen. Standard AAO with normal SSD (36MB/s) 1.5Gb RAM. (+ usual tweaks - Firefox3, OpenOffice2.4, xfce desktop, pidgin, bluetooth, thunderbird)

Using bootchart and tweaking the start scripts I've got mine booting from pressing the power button to desktop and panel displayed in 8 seconds. Also as a bonus this has got rid of the intermittent "HAL Errors" I'd been getting since switching to the standard xfce desktop. I reckon there's probably a second or two still to eek out.

All the hardware sill comes up and works, battery icon, wifi connects, bluetooth, hotplug devices appear and so on.

Is anyone else tuning their start times?

 

I'm quite pleased with the 15 seconds I get as standard, especially when I compare to my Dell XPS quad core running Vista which takes over a minute after you've logged in!

Any tips on shaving a few seconds off boot that you can share?

 

Amazing! Please tell us how you did it!

 

Ok looks pretty clean. Bootchart attached.
Rebooted loads of times, seems happy and stable. I need to go through my config scripts and document what I've changed now.
The first bootchart is stopped once the desktop loads.
The second shows everything else loading after and is stopped sometime after boot once the SSD activity light stops.

edit. hmm ok the pics loaded in the opposite order!

 

Wow that's amazing! Do you have time to do the same for Ubuntu?

 

How can you boot in 8 seconds, when my One already takes 7 seconds to display the Acer BIOS bootup screen ???

 

I unboxed my A1 yesterday. OEM it booted first time in less than 10 seconds. I haven't installed any software yet except the updates. I'll get my stopwatch out... its more like 17 seconds now- but that is impressive! Shutdown is 25 seconds. If I get bored I might mess with it.

I'm running Linpus on the SSD. No idea how the version with winblows or a HDD boots. I'd expect there to be a difference fer sure fer sure.

Anyone able to post the differences on boot times or shutdown times based these variables?

 

Hmmm.... I think I would like to see this with my own eyes

On my machine, it takes six seconds from pressing the power button until the Acer BIOS splash appears. On your chart, it looks to me like xfdesktop doesn't _start_ until 6-7 seconds from one bootchartd initializes.

And if I understand correctly, bootchart works by substituting itself for the init process, which doesn't get started until the kernel is substantially loaded and a root filesystem is mounted. It must surely take a second or two to load the kernel and initialise basic IO stuff.

So even if the desktop displays instantly, it still looks to me like you've got a desktop time of 6 seconds + kernel load time (2 seconds?) + 7 seconds = about 15 seconds.

In any event, to get 8 seconds to desktop when it takes at least six seconds to the fist glimmer of a bootloader seems pretty optimistic. Or does you machine get to the bootloader stage quicker? Have you fiddled with the BIOS settings at all?

 

shutdown in 25?!that only happens to me when i have a lot of programs running

 

how can i do this ???

 

Hi kevin, yeah you're spot on there. To be totally truthful and 100% fair here I was timing from the BIOS splash appearing since I was starting over and over and over and..... etc. rather than powering off and on, and I'd forgotten about the power on delay.
So yes the headline time isn't quite that low, although it is quicker than the normal boot.
I've been fettling a bit more this week to try and get happy with it, and I did overcook it a little on the 8 second timing run it got a bit unreliable! but I seem to have a pretty stable set of scripts now.
I just need to create a diff of the start scripts to a normal build now.... wonder if I can extract the recovery image onto another partition and do it that way.

 

Fair enough. I can see how you can shave 2-3 seconds off the startup time. I thought losing 8-10 seconds was a bit optimistic

Actually, this is all a bit of a cheat (on Acer's part, not yours). Unlike a traditional desktop Linux, Linpus boot starts relatively few _useless_ services. I suppose you could eliminate or defer a few services if you don't use them (cupsd would be a good one -- I hardly ever print from my One). But there isn't the same cruft you get on an untuned desktop Linux.

So it seems to me that all you're really doing with this sort of tweaking is deferring some services to start up after the desktop appears. Which is fine as far as it goes, but I think a better test would be `time to get to the Google home page from pressing the power button'. Or perhaps `time to get a word processor doc on the screen'.

Actually, what I'm more interested in is the time to wake up after a suspend. This seems to take almost as long as a cold boot on my unit, which is somewhat surprising.

 

yeah now I've got a hang of the scripts I'm planning on looking at my suspend/resume times since they are now considerably worse than cold startup time.

 

Any luck documenting what exactly you've done to strip down the bootup even more?

I'll trade you for my suspend workarounds in my howto viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2702

 

Sorry this is a bit off topic, but I'm curious about what exactly takes the time on suspend. I notice that you've taken out the stuff which (I guess) is just to blank off the screen during the wakeup. But you've also taken out some stuff which does things I don't understand with dbus. Do you know what the major contributor to the improvement is?

 

Did you do anything particularly special to get bootchart to work?

What I've tried:
- "yum install bootchart" to get the application. Yes, script can be found in "/sbin/".
- Opened up "/boot/grub/grub.conf" and added "init=/sbin/bootchartd" to the kernel line (elevator=noop and all)
- Rebooted. No "var/log/bootchart.tgz", no "tmp/bootchart.*" files.
- Removed the "logging=1" part from grub.conf, same deal.

So far no luck for me.

 

I couldn't get bootchart to actually make a chart for me either, but I'm running Ubuntu intrepid on a custom compiled kernel so could be a kernel thing maybe?

kevin : I don't know why exactly the default suspend takes so long, I didn't manage to fix it I just managed to replace it with a sequence of my own.

What needs to happen before suspend in a nutshell is the data must be synchronized to all the usb and hard drives, wifi and other devices need to be switched off so as to draw minmal power, etc. In some cases, like in the script I've linked to, some drivers need to be unloaded and then restarted during the wake process to make sure everythign works again...

 

If I understand correctly, so long as you can get bootchart to make a file "/var/log/bootchart.tgz", you can upload it to the bootchart.org website and it'll spit out a chart for you. Unfortunately, I'm getting the impression it's ignoring my "init=/sbin/bootchartd" argument to kernel. Yarg!

 

PoV: ahhhhh I see Thanks for the tip, generating mine now! The app USED to put a chart right into its own /var directory, which is what I was used to but I guess that was some time ago.

 

There's also a bunch of AAO boot time tweaks here:
http://onelinux.org/wiki/index.php/Docs/Tweaks