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Booting Fedora 8 Test 3 vs openSUSE 10.3

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by Harald Hoyer — last modified Mar 12, 2008 15:44

Every month the discussion about faster booting of Fedora appears on the mailing lists. Here is a comparison of Fedora to openSUSE with some suggestions and improvements.

openSUSE 10.3

Bootchart

Boot time: 35s

Incredible speed, I must admit. Time to look at Fedora.

Fedora 8 Test 3 - Default Installation - SELinux off

Bootchart

Boot time: 73s

Default Installtion, SELinux turned off. Wow, that's disappointing for the average Desktop user. Let see, why it is so slow.

Fedora 8 Test 3 - Same Services - SELinux off

Bootchart

Boot time: 46s

Turning off all the services, which are not started by default on the openSUSE, the boot time is nearly comparable now.

The following services are only started:

  • iptables
  • network
  • irqbalance
  • rsyslog
  • auditd
  • cpuspeed
  • messagebus
  • rpcbind
  • rpcidmapd
  • nscd
  • sshd
  • ConsoleKit
  • crond
  • atd
  • avahi-daemon
  • cups
  • haldaemon
  • anacron
  • NetworkManager
  • NetworkManagerDispatcher

Fedora 8 Test 3 - Same Services - SELinux off - No rhgb

Bootchart

Boot time: 38s

Switching off rhgb saves 8s. Wow, that is much, compared to the whole boot process without the kernel time.

Fedora 8 Test 3 - Same Services - SELinux off - No rhgb - prcsys

Bootchart

Boot time: 34s

By installing prcsys, adding missing LSB Headers to the services, it is now less boot time than openSUSE. Hurray! :-)

Fedora 8 Test 3 - Same Services - SELinux off - No rhgb - prcsys - No Floppy module

Bootchart

Boot time: 32s

Removing /etc/sysconfig/modules/udev-stw.modules, which basically only loads the floppy module, because floppies are not autoloaded just saved me 2 seconds. I have no floppy on my machine, so that was only probing on my machine. Time to think of another mechanism of loading this module or not.

Update:

alias pnp:dPNP0700 floppy

This may do the trick in modprobe.conf. Maybe that should be a modalias in the floppy module.

Fedora 8 Test 3 - Same Services - SELinux on - No rhgb - prcsys - No Floppy module

Bootchart

Boot time: 37s

To see how much SELinux would slow down, I turned selinux on, relabled and rebooted.

 

For the reference, I uploaded the Machine Profile to Smolt

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subject

Posted by Peter Lemenkov at Oct 11, 2007 17:26
Very interesting, thanks!
BTW we may achieve some speedups if mainboard is LinuxBIOS-compatible.

Test versions

Posted by red at Oct 12, 2007 08:26
Didn't they put all the debug stuff into every package for the test release? AFAIK that'd mean an appreciable slow down.

Test Versions

Posted by Harald Hoyer at Oct 12, 2007 09:53
AFAIK only the kernel may contain additional debug code.

Startup time

Posted by Finalzone at Oct 12, 2007 08:26
Is debug mode enabled in Fedora 8 Test 3? I think the better start up feature is not included in that version.

debug mode

Posted by Harald Hoyer at Oct 12, 2007 09:53
which debug mode? kernel?

did you mean 'SELinux on' in the first entry?

Posted by Luis at Oct 12, 2007 08:26
I think you meant SELinux on in the first entry.

SELinux

Posted by Harald Hoyer at Oct 12, 2007 09:53
no, Selinux was off in all but the last bootchart.

On-Demand Startup

Posted by Richi Plana at Oct 13, 2007 14:04
Why can't we make it so that services are only started when it's needed (e.g. kind of like kernel modules which only get autoloaded, services can start when an attempt to open a certain TCP port or connection to a well-known D-Bus is made) or (lower priority) when it is hardwired to start on system startup (like it currently does).

Great work

Posted by Jon Nettleton at Oct 15, 2007 17:04
I have done a bunch of work on optimizing the fedora boot process. Could you post the changes that you made so I can test them out on my setup to see how it works? Thanks ahead of time.

How very, very slow

Posted by Matt at Dec 04, 2007 11:41
Windows XP boots faster than this.

Muhahaha ;)

Posted by Derdummeriker at Dec 20, 2007 12:03
The guys here are talking about a new OS... windows XP is a nearly 5 year old piece of code..... Compare the boottimes with Vista, then you can take back the "How very, very slow" ;)))

I like fedora and the changes making it faster... but i dont like that udev starts so slow.... and on opensuse the paketmanagemant is very annoying... if you enable several sources for packages it takes quite some time till the manager is ready......

Fedora 9

Posted by Peter at Apr 05, 2008 09:41
Done a benchmark on Fedora 9 yet?

Re: Fedora 9

Posted by Harald Hoyer at Apr 05, 2008 09:44
https://www.redhat.com/[…]/msg00207.html