General TC > General TC Talk
innovating Tinycore proposal - preliminary poll
P5music:
Hello,
this thread is about the possibility of creating a third stem of Tinycore (along with microcore.iso and tinycore.iso) focused on boot time optimization, aiming to reach near "instant boot" (in a perspective view).
It is an amazing endeavour for Tinycore because:
"The time that a product takes to boot directly impacts the first perception an end user has of the product. Regardless of how attractive or well designed a consumer electronic device is, the time required to move the device from off to an interactive, usable state is critical to obtaining a positive end user experience. Turning on a device is Use Case #1."
this is from
http://elinux.org/Boot_Time
In this page you will find many suggestions about the possible optimization: many are very feasible, especially on recent hardware (that all of us have, along with old PCs).
So this thread is like a poll. You are encouraged to say your opinion, in particular about what method you consider effective or feasible, or the way it should be implemented.
You also could post dmesg output excerpts (syslog printk.time=1 boot options) in order to point out which steps slow down your boot. You will find that many of those delays are unreasonable and you can know why reading the above mentioned web page or reading documentation about linux boot process, available on the web.
It's an opportunity for Tinycore to be the innovation leader in this field. It is coherent with Tinycore's phylosophy: the boot time is the first reason one likes Tinycore in the first time.
You are wrong if you are thinking that hidden laboratories of smart companies with geeks inside are working on this. Many embedded devices that are sold like commercial products are slow to boot, some are slower than PC boots and corresponding application loads.
curaga:
Why should it be a separate iso, shouldn't everyone benefit from fast boots?
jerramy:
I fully support the quest to achieve as close to instant boot as possible. I'd like to see where this topic goes, and hope that any good suggestions are integrated into Tiny Core's main release. I agree that boot time is a cruicial first impression made.
I must say that Tiny Core is already the fastest booting linux I've found. It seems to me (though I haven't compared recently) that it's faster than the other two or three competing products.
If dmesg were modified to include timestamps, it would aid in the profiling of bootup. What other logs are available? Does the stuff "quiet" suppresses go somewhere, or is that just dmesg?
P5music:
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---Why should it be a separate iso, shouldn't everyone benefit from fast boots?
--- End quote ---
--- End quote ---
It'd better start as experimental Tinycore side-project. There are issue to solve, I do not think it can work on every kind of hardware Tinycore works on now, just from start. However it has to be investigated.
--- Quote ---If dmesg were modified to include timestamps, it would aid in the profiling of bootup.
--- End quote ---
you have to use
"syslog printk.time=1" boot options
maybe you have to drop the "quiet" option too.
here's an example from my system:
--- Code: ---[ 0.272718] Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs...
[ 0.483556] Freeing initrd memory: 8241k freed
[ 0.886042] Serial: 8250/16550 driver, 4 ports, IRQ sharing disabled
[ 3.897038] floppy0: no floppy controllers found
[ 3.898416] Probing IDE interface ide0...
[ 4.433376] ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
[ 4.433481] Probing IDE interface ide1...
[ 4.966706] ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
[ 7.744081] Adding 760844k swap on /dev/ramzswap0. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:760844k SS
[ 10.725731] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access Generic- Multi-Card 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
[ 10.730078] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 11.294334] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access Generic USB SD Reader
[ 11.296234] sd 7:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
[ 11.963721] sd 7:0:0:1: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 11.972410] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 16.856770] generic-usb 0003:14AA:0226.0001: timeout initializing
[ 17.011500] generic-usb 0003:062A:0000.0002: input: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [HID 062a:0000] on usb-0000:00:1d.7-1.4/input0
[ 18.030920] sky2 eth0: enabling interface
--- End code ---
floppy:
I found a thread in this forum which files to be excluded from backup/restore (this backup/restore step is part of a booting). This is one aspect of gaining speed.
An aspect I wanted to have a look (when I have time) is to use CPU tools available in the extensions. Perhaps something can be done there. So, if somebody has an Idea how gaining speed with an AMD K6-2 450MhZ..?
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