30 Second Startup

Summary

Make Fedora boot and shut down faster. The goal is to be at the login screen in 30 seconds and be as fast as possible after the login (gnome-session).

Owner

Name: HaraldHoyer
Name: MatthiasClasen

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 10
Last updated: 2008-04-14
Percentage of completion: 75%

Detailed Description

Earlier attempts at this can be found here Releases/FeatureBootShutdownSpeedup and here Releases/FeatureBetterStartup (different, but related).

With the switch to upstart we have a lot of necessary pieces in place now to cut down on initscript bloat and use dependencies to parallelize the boot.

Harald recently started some investigations into where the boot time goes, see here , here and here .

Some earlier comments on the problems related to device enumeration are discussed here

Harald has also compared bootcharts of several distributions .

Bugzilla Tracker for slow boot components

Improvements with a modified readahead setup possible.

Benefit to Fedora

A faster boot makes for happy users.

Scope

Possibly involves all packages that are involved in the boot sequence, udev, module-init-tools, kernel, nash, upstart, readahead.

Test Plan

install bootchart
modify /sbin/bootchartd to exit on "firefox" not "gdm kdm" etc. and sleep 10-20 seconds after that
reboot, login, start firefox, close firefox
measure time until closing of firefox

User Experience

Turn on computer, wait 30 seconds, select user on login screen.

Dependencies

Contingency Plan

This is an incremental feature. If we don't quite get down to 30 seconds, too bad, we can just take whatever improvements we have. If it turns out that readahead cannot be fixed to consistently improve boot speed, we will simply not reenable it.

Documentation

Should not be needed.

Release Notes