Which distro is faastest in booting ?

[saurya_s]

Hi all
I run mandrake 9.2 on the machine below. my machine boots in 2.5min. i haven't got any unnecessary daemons running.
Right I am looking for short booting time for average Linux user level distros , not the geeks version like Debian, Slakware etc- not reached that stage yet!!
Right recompiling kernel etc didn't help or it is the problem with mdk?
When I tried Suse I never noticed booting time. What is your experience guys?
Thanks for sharing
SS

[Hayl]

this is entirely dependant on the hardware, the kernel configuration, and what daemons are starting.

it has nothing to do with "distro" besides the fact that certain ones seem to start a lot of daemons by default and therefore make the boot slower.

[Fryguy8]

some distros certainly do other things besides load the kernel and daemons though.

The fastest booting distro I've ever seen is my LFS install I had a few months back. It would go from bios to console "login:" prompt in ~10seconds.

[mdwatts]

This fairly recent thread (http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=120049&highlight=boot) also asks and answers the same question.

[ph34r]

LFS or Gentoo would get me to a ?DM login (gui) in about 30 seconds... Slack was about 45.

Of course, any distro will boot mega fast if you pass the init=/bin/bash option to lilo.

[saurya_s]

mine is 2.5min from switching on the computer to running KDE with autologin enabled. Right this is similar to Andycrofts case in the thread which is mentioned!!
Right the machine does show what all it is doing while it is booting, can I somehow save the message and see it later to see what all i don't need.
SS

[saurya_s]

Originally posted by ph34r
LFS or Gentoo would get me to a ?DM login (gui) in about 30 seconds... Slack was about 45.

Of course, any distro will boot mega fast if you pass the init=/bin/bash option to lilo.

What does this mean 'Of course, any distro will boot mega fast if you pass the init=/bin/bash option to lilo.'

And how does one go about doing this? Does it have any adverse effect on the machine?
SS

[ph34r]

dmesg > startup_stuff.txt

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by saurya_s
What does this mean 'Of course, any distro will boot mega fast if you pass the init=/bin/bash option to lilo.'

And how does one go about doing this? Does it have any adverse effect on the machine?
SS

You will end up with a shell (bash) and nothing else. No X/KDE/Gnome etc.

[Hayl]

Originally posted by Fryguy8
some distros certainly do other things besides load the kernel and daemons though.


possibly hotplug scripts, or autodetect scripts but any of that can be turned off.

[saurya_s]

Originally posted by Hayl
possibly hotplug scripts, or autodetect scripts but any of that can be turned off.
I think so, it does some type of hardware detection which I don't require at each boot. So i guess i can diable them but can I invoke it later when I add new device and ask it to detect?
Right what I also use is USB flash drive, so if i diable them will it stop mounting them as well?
SS

[UID500]

freebsd 5.2, 30secs without ntp sync.

about 35 with ntp sync.

[lugoteehalt]

not the geeks version like Debian, Slakware etc- not reached that stage yet!!
Eh? I use Debian and am incompetent rather than geek.

Using Debian Potato - this starts fast, but bit ancient.

[JamminJoeyB]

Throwing in my $.02

I had a PIII 733 booting Evil Entity Linux that got me to a gui in about 30 seconds. Slackware on the same machine was about the same. Mandy with everything turned off that could be was well over a min. I never timed anything, but I know faster boot times when I see them. I got rid of Mandrake because RPM dependicies were killing me.

My current system PIV 2.0gig loads nicely, but I haven't rebooted since I upgraded to 2.4.22 kernel in slackware 9.1.

Besides, unless you are patching/installing a kernel there really isn't a need to boot or reboot. Ok well if you are dual booting to Bill's OS.

[AndrewLubinus89]

Slack boots about 30-45 seconds (to bash, no *dm) and freebsd takes about 15-20 to get to bash. Rh with gdm takes about a minute and mandrake takes a bit longer. Windows takes over a minute as well. I like slack the best though.

[automatic]

using slackware (default) on my office machine (duron 750mhz):

from lilo to kdm login screen:
00:00:50.9

from lilo to kde screen:
00:01:11.6

my friend said it is too slow for slackware, can be faster if I reconfigure it.

Joe-L

[blackbelt_jones]

I have no idea which isfastest, but on my system, SuSE 9.0 sure is slooooow!

[The Linux Kid]

From when I press the on button on my machine, to when i get a Welcome to Linux prompt (text only) it takes 1 min and 5 secs. I run a server on that machine:

800Mhz
128Mb Ram

The Linux Kid

[SatchMho]

I have the same slow booting problem, but mine seems to be slower than everyone elses here.
I am running mandrake 10.0 on a:

PIII 550Mhz
320Mbs of ram
~500Mbs of swap (it was as high as 1.1gig)
(This is an old Dell Optiplex 550)

From lilo to text login is 5 mins.
From lilo to KDE auto login is 9 mins.

I have tried SuSE 9.0 and a HD install of Knoppix 3.3. All had about the same times

Booting Knoppix 3.3 from the CD I get to the KDE desktop in 2 mins.

I have turned off just about everything from booting at start up. Anybody got any ideas?

SatchMho

[rocketpcguy]

remember hdparm settings too (search for that). and lighter DE or wm like XFCE or *box.

my slackware boots to desktop with everything loaded in 30.5 seconds (fluxbox + xmms startup)

[chesskidd]

I think "Damn Small Linux" is one of the fastest booting distro.
And in mandrake, you can set the bootup with textmode first, it can save a lot of wasted time on starting up X. :)
How do you all know your bootup timing like exactly 2.5 mins, 1.59 mins... ? or just time with your watch :rolleyes:
Is there a timing program that logs it?

[JohnT]

Originally posted by chesskidd
I think "Damn Small Linux" is one of the fastest booting distro.
And in mandrake, you can set the bootup with textmode first, it can save a lot of wasted time on starting up X. :)
How do you all know your bootup timing like exactly 2.5 mins, 1.59 mins... ? or just time with your watch :rolleyes:
Is there a timing program that logs it? Mine's guaranteed by Slackware :D

[psi42]

I'm too lazy to time my Slack 9.1 bootup right now, but it seems in line with the other Slack users who have posted. Except on Thursdays, because on Thursdays I run chkrootkit (I'm so paranoid) so that takes well over 3 minutes.

I find turning off hotplug makes a huge difference. Hotplug is great, it allows for easy hardware autodetection, but once you know what modules you need, just do it by hand and turn hotplug off. Bootup is much faster that way.


~psi42

[chesskidd]

JohnT,

Mine's guaranteed by Slackware :confused:

I did the old-fashioned way, timed with my watch, and it's about 2.40 minutes.
Geez.. it spends 1.10 mins stalls at the hda timeout error. :rolleyes:
That's the biggest bootup drag there, followed by dhcp startup,
other than that, it'd have been around ~1:30+/- minutes into textmode, gentoo, 2.6.5-r1 version.

[SatchMho]

I tried tweaking my hdparm settings and was able to more than triple my MB/sec, but Mandrake 10.0 still takes 9mins from lilo to kde desktop and 4mins from lilo to text login. Any othe ideas?

[JohnT]

Originally posted by SatchMho
I tried tweaking my hdparm settings and was able to more than triple my MB/sec, but Mandrake 10.0 still takes 9mins from lilo to kde desktop and 4mins from lilo to text login. Any othe ideas? 9 minutes?? Take a nap. Mow the lawn, get a college education, go on a rafting expedition up the Orinoco River. Copy your /var/log/syslog...just the last mount..you can look at the times to determine that and attach it ...not paste it to your next post.

[chesskidd]

Is there a way to execute the startup script (init.d? am I right?) later,
Just so I can get into the login promt as fast as possible when it boots up?
then I can log into root or sudo to fire up the init.d from there.
Anybody knows how to do this? :rolleyes:

[The Linux Kid]

Chesskid,

A) I think that init.d has some things that load that are required.

B) If you really wanted to, copy init.d to somewhere else and then empty init.d.. And on startup, you can execute your somewhere else script...

The Linux Kid

[hard candy]

You could use precaching to speed boot time by about 10% according to this article:
Boot time speedup (http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/2157)

And here is a similiar thread at Linux Questions:
Boot time poll (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/178546)

And here is an article on speeding up boot time by having processes run in parallel rather than sequentially:
Boot linux faster (http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-boot.html?ca=dgr-lnxw09BootFaster)

Me, I try to leave it on whenever possible and accept the default boot up process, it takes 47 seconds to get to a root login in level 3. Somehow the dhcp process gets hung up , seems the Linksys router and Slackware are looking for different messages.

[Dark Ninja]

Originally posted by saurya_s
I think so, it does some type of hardware detection which I don't require at each boot. So i guess i can diable them but can I invoke it later when I add new device and ask it to detect?
Right what I also use is USB flash drive, so if i diable them will it stop mounting them as well?
SS

You are correct -- Mandrake performs a hardware check each time you boot. You can turn this off under the services controls (I think it's considered to be a daemon.)

I'm not sure if your USB drive will still mount. You may have to do it manually. Although, if I can remember from my Mandrake days, there are two hardware services -- one runs when you boot to check for things like video cards/RAM/sound card/etc. The other one constantly runs checking for hot-pluggable items like USB drives. You may be able to find more on Mandrake's website.

I do remember disabling the hardware check and my system boot time did speed up -- however, it still wasn't near as fast as my Gentoo boot time is now (<30 seconds including X server and OpenBox)

[cybertron]

Originally posted by SatchMho
I tried tweaking my hdparm settings and was able to more than triple my MB/sec, but Mandrake 10.0 still takes 9mins from lilo to kde desktop and 4mins from lilo to text login. Any othe ideas?

What does it seem to be hanging on? I've had some trouble in Mandrake with it getting stuck for minutes on the "Starting interface eth0" part of boot when I had my laptop disconnected from the network. Even my old P1 166MMX loaded in 5 minutes or less (I think) and I thought that was horribly slow so yours should be loading a lot quicker than that. There it was mostly the "Finding module dependencies" part.

On the plus side with Linux you shouldn't have to reboot very often, so as long as it runs fine once it's up it's not so bad:)

[Fryguy8]

Another overlooked thing is random checks in general in init.d. Slackware and LFS both have an advantage here because you build from basically nothing. But if you want to increase your boot time, make sure you go through your rc scripts one by one and eliminate things that you don't need. Should be able to save a few seconds that way.

I had my LFS system going from the power button to a CLI in around 15 seconds by having an EXTREMELY stripped down boot (the entire boot process just about fit on one screen).

[hard candy]

I think the cause of most delays in linux distros is name resolution. Make sure /etc/resolv.conf has the correct nameservers and in the correct order. Your ISP can usually give you this info if you email them or contact the support dept.
Also, make sure your localhost name matches the name in /etc/host.

[bs_texas]

Originally posted by saurya_s
Right the machine does show what all it is doing while it is booting, can I somehow save the message and see it later to see what all i don't need.
I've seen this question asked several times, but don't ever recall seeing a specific answer. dmesg doesn't do it. dmesg has a lot of useful info, but it is not the text, verbatim, that scrolls across the screen as the bootup is happening. Unless you can manipulate it in one of the startup scripts or something.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Fryguy8
Another overlooked thing is random checks in general in init.d. Slackware and LFS both have an advantage here because you build from basically nothing. But if you want to increase your boot time, make sure you go through your rc scripts one by one and eliminate things that you don't need. Should be able to save a few seconds that way.

I had my LFS system going from the power button to a CLI in around 15 seconds by having an EXTREMELY stripped down boot (the entire boot process just about fit on one screen). Same here.....it did fit on one screen. Extremely fast.

[chesskidd]

I just fixed my harddisk dma timeout errors, recompiled the kernel.
currently gentoo 2.6.5-r1.

booted up and timed in old-fashioned way, it goes 37 seconds :eek:
to get to the login prompt. :eek:
Haven't stripped the init.d and rc.d scripts yet, will try that sometime.

Just got 1 thing to say, it does beat my notebook mandrake 10's bootup speed (about 4 minutes) :D.

[chesskidd]

did another timing test, my win xp takes 29 seconds to bootup :rolleyes:
(with networking services, and other startup program stuff)

um...my gentoo's slower..., gotta make my gentoo box to beat that time :D

[cybertron]

Mandrake 10 with a custom 2.6.6 kernel ~56 seconds. That's with basically no optimization and who knows what mistakes I made in compiling the kernel, although it feels at least as fast as the stock Mandrake kernel so I don't think I screwed up too badly:)

I can only dream of Windows loading in < 30 seconds. Of course, it feels like an eternity because there's no boot messages to watch scroll by so I get bored:p