Category: linux

How fast your linux boots, really depends on your distro and of course it’s their job to have it boot as fast as possible. They try as much as possible scenarios and make sane decisions on where to optimize. But they can’t test every possible configuration, so what if you just end up with a suboptimal situation (possibly without realizing? :)). Even if you know your boot takes too much time, how would you locate the culprit(s)?

This is where Bootchart jumps in. Bootchart is a tool which makes it possible assess resource consumption throughout boot time. It is really simple to set up, just add a kernel param! Data is collected in memory using tmpfs and dumped to disk at the end of the boot process. This data then gets processed by a java app which outputs an SVG/PNG.

It seems the opensuse guys, actually coolo, used this tool to optimize boot performance for opensuse 10.3. I must say I am quite satisfied with my opensuse boot times although I do have the impression that 11.0 seems to be a tad slower than 10.3. So I’m definitely going to try out this tool and compare the results 🙂

Thanks to my brother for the tip.

Part 2

Accidentally, a few hours after writing this post, I ran into this very interesting article about boot speedups presented at the Linux Plumbers Conference last month. (Watch a modified fedora boot in 5 secs on an eeePC)

So, Saturday I went to Fosdem, it was my first open source conference attendance. 🙂 In general, it was quite an experience… To walk around a campus and see geeks and hear programmer’s slang everywhere and that all open source related is really.. unreal. 🙂 It was also fun to recognize quite some people, just because I read all their blogs. 🙂

I kinda got up late, so I missed the talk about linux in Hollywood. Google maps told me that I would get there in 30min so I naively set off to Brussels to get just in time for the next one. Of course I didn’t think of all the traffic lights and lack of parking space there. 😉 I saw a parking on the campus on the satellite, just to realize once there, that it was for VUB personnel only, d’oh. 🙂

First I ‘discovered’ the area, what is where, you get a nice map though, and all rooms were very clearly indicated. Then I went to get a sandwich and was ready for the first talk. 🙂

This was a KDE talk on the upcoming Amarok 2.0. It was interesting but my modest music needs are already amply fullfilled by the current Amarok. 🙂 Then I quickly sneaked into the opensuse room to get the second half of the opensuse 11.0 intro by coolo. It looks promising, as always, but especially the “damn fast” package management system I can’t wait for. 🙂 There wasn’t much detail about that though as there was going to be a talk on that on Sunday. One questionable decision they made for 11.0 is to have the root password be the same as the user password, by default. At first, it doesn’t make sense at all, but if you think about all the sudo’ing and apparently a lot of users choosing the same anyway, you can’t really blame them, although I’m not sure they make it clear enough that this will happen automatically (i.e. is the default), if the user does not choose otherwise in the installer (it is a checkbox which you have to tick off). They made a huge effort to make the installer _even_ simpler (apparently it was still not simple enough), which this password thing was also an attempt at.

Then I went to the second half of the Crystal Space presentation, mainly to see my colleague in action and gaming stuff is always fun. 🙂 It seems he ran a bit out of time which is a pity since I was interested to see more about the Blender / CS project which was touched only briefly.

After that I quickly went off to the KDE room again to get the last bits of the Nepomuk presentation by Sebastian Trueg (he’s also the K3B guy!). I really wanted to see his face as I always mix up the 2 KDE Sebastians 🙂 Nepomuk seems to have a lot potential, but it seems it still needs a lot of time..

At the opensuse stand I tried to explain my font problem to Francis Giannaros (apokryphos) and he tried to solve it by convincing me that the default font size should be 9 instead of 10. 🙂 not sure about that but the next install will tell me. 😉 He also helped out configuring aiglx for kde4, but that didn’t seem to increase performance much after all.

After that I tried to catch the last bits of the build service workshop. It was kind of difficult for Adrian Schroeter to give a nice demo since he had a lot of network trouble on that laptop (or the build service, but that seemed to go quite fine on mine). Btw, I managed to ‘convince’ Adrian to give me an opensuse baseball cap, thanks again! 😉 He’s a really nice guy.

I then went for the last bit of KDE on windows (skipping the suse base presentation as it is recorded anyways 😉 ), no big news there as I am already quite familiar with the project anyway. The room was fully packed btw. After that everyone went off and a few stayed with me for the GGZ presentation. I stayed there mainly because of lack of other interesting presentations. 🙂

I was a bit disappointed to miss the second day as it seemed twice as crammed with interesting presentations although it was already very interesting. 🙂

To finish up, I took a picture of a part of the stands with my cellphone. As you can see, it was quite crowded but still doable. 🙂