Make Linux boot faster.

[borromini]

I recently posted in a thread were someone brought up the booting time of Linux. I assumed it would 'always' be slow (i.e. with present linuxes) but some people explained me that wasn't the case. So what I would like to see put together here is tips, tricks and tweaks y'all guys have to speed up your Linux boot. I for one disabled hardware discovery services, and lots of daemons I don't need, or ever will use.

So I have two things.
- disable discovery service (is this a daemon too btw?)
- disable unused daemons

I hope we can make this list waaaay longer . Thanks in advance for your input.

[truoc444]

use DSL on a 3 GHz+ machine. it'll boot really fast.

[borromini]

Sorry man but I'd like some serious input... I am running a fairly minimal Slackware-based distro (400 MB ISO) on 1.5 Ghz and higher systems, with 200 Mhz FSB (Athlon Xp's). So the distro itself is not the issue here.

If anyone might suggest recompiling the kernel, I'd like to know why, and what are the options that might gain you considerable time . I once optimized my kernel for K7 but honestly didn't notice much of it.

[genesus]

personally compile your own kernel, you will improve your boot time to about 10% of what it used to be...now that is fast...

[borromini]

I'll do that again and time it . Are there other possibilities?

[genesus]

disable every single thing that you don't need support for...I got fc4 booting as fast as I ever had a stage 1 gentoo boot, well within a few seconds anyway...

[borromini]

Hotplug and udev are required right? I plug in USB-stick & HD's once in a while. Right now I have this when I do # service list:

root[stijn]# service list
acpid : [on]
alsa : [on]
cups : [on]
discover : [off]
gpm : [on]
hotplug : [on]
howl : [on]
inetd : [on]
ip_forward : [off]
modules : [on]
netfilter : [on]
nfsd : [on]
pcmcia : [off]
portmap : [off]
postinstall : [off]
serial : [off]
sshd : [off]
syslog : [on]
sysvinit : [on]
udev : [on]

[psic]

I for one disabled hardware discovery services, and lots of daemons I don't need, or ever will use.

So I have two things.
- disable discovery service (is this a daemon too btw?)
- disable unused daemons

I hope we can make this list waaaay longer . Thanks in advance for your input.

A light GUI can speed things up. Not the boot up itself, but on my laptop (which is a bit older), KDE takes over 15 seconds to start (from the login to a usable desktop), Xfce a bit over 5, Enlightenment about 3.

One question, though: how do you disable unused daemons? Go through the /etc/rcX.d directories and toss out anything which you don't need (cups comes to mind, as I use a laptop)?

edit: I might also mention a program I've heard of, bootchart, which visually shows you the boot up sequence so you can see what is taking a long time etc. Never used it, though.

[AndrewB]

my gentoo install is quite fast
just coz it has what i need, not what any given company decides i need runniong

so my advice is...\
gentoo or lfs

[borromini]

You just disable a daemon by disabling the x bit: # chmod 666 /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug for example. I have a Slackware-style system, but Zenwalk has a 'service' command. Then you just do # service disable [servicename] to disable the service.

As for a good GUI: I already have Xfce . And I like it very much. One of my main reasons to switch from KDE was actually speed & responsiveness...

As for distro: I'd like to stick to this one . So what I'm looking for is distro- & DE/Wm-independent tips to startup linux faster . Untill you get to the GUI that's loading, that is.

@ the guy dressed in black: I mentioned before I'm not wanting to switch distro's . Thanks for the input anyway.