[gentoo-amd64] Re: boottime
Mark Haney [EMAIL PROTECTED] posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:43:35 -0500: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I allready took everything out of my kernel but is there a big difference with modules or buildin's ? And X allready starts at boot. And why shouldn't I use genkernel? I don't know about moving X, but this is a thread I thought about starting yesterday so this is very timely. I'll look at X to see how things are affected. I'd suggest /not/ putting X in the boot runlevel, unless you're one of the It's not booted until I have a nice pretty GUI with a pointer to click stuff because I don't know how to use the command line folks, and on Gentoo at least, those folks should be comparatively rare, since Gentoo never has been and is not now designed for folks who aren't willing to be their own admins, including those scared of the command line. There's other distributions that are a better fit for people who prefer to let someone else do the command line and admin stuff. Here, even tho I'm on an always-on Internet connection, I boot to initlevel 2, nonetwork, and without X as well. I start all services (including named and privoxy, which are normally of use only when the net's up, but don't require it; they start fast enough) except ntp/ntp- client and the network they depend on. This way, if I'm just doing local admin work, say backups, or doing a git-bisect/build/install/reboot cycle while debugging a kernel regression, I get a faster boot, and don't end up constantly connecting to the NTP servers I sync to, every time I reboot. I have one each of the gpm triple-click functions set to init 3 (network) and init 2 (nonetwork) so I can switch between them without having to sudo. That way, if I AM going to be starting X (or doing something else that needs the network and Internet connection), I can log in as my regular user, and triple-click to start the network and time services. Then I run startx as my regular user if that's what I want to do. Actually, I have a couple scripts that set XSESSION appropriately and take care of a bit of additional housekeeping for whatever X environment I'll be running (called k3 and k4, for the kde3 and kde4 environments I run), then invoke startx. I have it setup so I can source these scripts and it'll log me out at the text VC as it starts X and whichever KDE, so I don't have the unused text login sitting there wasting resources. So I don't have X in any runlevel, DEFINITELY not in the boot runlevel, as I start it from my text login using a script that calls startx. Of course, some folks may indeed want X started in their default runlevel, which is fine, but putting it in boot, so it runs for every runlevel except single, just doesn't make sense to me, because there are valid tasks one may wish to do at the text console, in which case starting X just wastes startup time and computer resources. As for fast boots... Really, here, the BIOS initialization takes longer than anything else. Here are some observations and optimizations I've made. * Under some circumstances, fsck can take a significant amount of time, particularly if there are a lot of partitions to fsck and mount, but since I use reiserfs, which doesn't really do more in a boot-time fsck than it does automatically at mount anyway (if there's something damaged beyond what it can automatically fix at mount, you gotta run the longer fsck with it unmounted, anyway), so I just set the fstab fsck field to 0 for all partitions and let reiserfs do its thing at mount. * As already mentioned by others, initramfs/initrd take significant additional time, as do loading modules. Therefore, build into the kernel (not as modules) all your normally loaded modules and drivers, and don't run an initramfs/initrd unless you have special case needs that require it. Additionally, don't build stuff that's never loaded at all, and build as modules (and don't load by default) stuff that's only occasionally used. As examples, I build fat/vfat, ext2 (and no ext3 at all, my system's all reiserfs as mentioned above), floppy, loop, and usb- storage as modules because I don't use them much of the time. * With stable baselayout (1.x), the parallel startup didn't work too well. It works much better with ~baselayout (2.0.0) and openrc (0.3-rc1 is what I have currently), but it's still off by default, and there may be a few dependency tweaks necessary to get everything loading in the right order, depending on your system configuration. Of course, baselayout 2 and openrc are quite different than the old baselayout 1 as well, so if you upgrade, be prepared for a decent amount of reconfiguring and perhaps some tweaking before you get your boot sequence running smoothly. There are definitely reasons it's not marked stable yet, and probably won't be any time in the real near future, either. Openrc in particular is still under heavy
Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: boottime
On Thursday 13 November 2008, Matthias Bethke wrote: Hi Volker, on Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:29:22AM +0100, you wrote: there are people who know how to use a commandline and STILL want X. In fact out of 100 boots I want X 99 times - and I guess most people want X too. So just because you 'think' gentoo users don't like X, does not make it true at all. I agree having X in the default runlevel is a good idea for the vast majority of users, even the most CLI-savvy. But having it in the boot runlevel was a major PITA when SuSE started doing it and I had to manage some installations that used NIS and LDAP. We wanted a nice user list in kdm for students to click on, and it just doesn't work if *dm starts before ypbind. You can choose not to have the user list or live with the inconsistent broken look on first boot, or put X back in level 5. cheers, Matthias that might all be true for your setup, but for a single user desktop putting X in boot (in gentoo), can be a GOOD THING to do. Why wait for cron, hddtemp, nscd, metalog, postfix, cpufrequtils, smartd? It is all very non essential - this services can all savely start while you are typing in your password at that nice kdm prompt.
Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: boottime
Hi Volker, on Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:29:22AM +0100, you wrote: there are people who know how to use a commandline and STILL want X. In fact out of 100 boots I want X 99 times - and I guess most people want X too. So just because you 'think' gentoo users don't like X, does not make it true at all. I agree having X in the default runlevel is a good idea for the vast majority of users, even the most CLI-savvy. But having it in the boot runlevel was a major PITA when SuSE started doing it and I had to manage some installations that used NIS and LDAP. We wanted a nice user list in kdm for students to click on, and it just doesn't work if *dm starts before ypbind. You can choose not to have the user list or live with the inconsistent broken look on first boot, or put X back in level 5. cheers, Matthias -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 pgpfVRy7mWoTV.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: boottime
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: *snip the rest because it is too long to read and usual duncan talk*. Let's be nice. I'll confess I often don't read everything duncan types, but it isn't like he spams the list such that you can't easily hit delete if you're not interested in his two emails per month. For those topics I'm interested in I find his perspective helpful. Even if I don't always agree with everything he posts there is often some useful stuff in there. I still use his CFLAGS 80% of the time. Regardless, your post would have stood just fine on its own without the personal attacks. I agree that booting into X is hardly the exception among gentoo users/devs/etc. If I were running a back-end server I'd absolutely refrain from booting into X (granted, such as server would DEFININTELY run NTP), but there's no sense having to use startx on a desktop unless you really do spend most of your time staring at a shell.
Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: boottime
On Thursday 13 November 2008, Duncan wrote: Mark Haney [EMAIL PROTECTED] posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:43:35 -0500: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I allready took everything out of my kernel but is there a big difference with modules or buildin's ? And X allready starts at boot. And why shouldn't I use genkernel? I don't know about moving X, but this is a thread I thought about starting yesterday so this is very timely. I'll look at X to see how things are affected. I'd suggest /not/ putting X in the boot runlevel, unless you're one of the It's not booted until I have a nice pretty GUI with a pointer to click stuff because I don't know how to use the command line folks, and on Gentoo at least, those folks should be comparatively rare, since Gentoo never has been and is not now designed for folks who aren't willing to be their own admins, including those scared of the command line. There's other distributions that are a better fit for people who prefer to let someone else do the command line and admin stuff. there are people who know how to use a commandline and STILL want X. In fact out of 100 boots I want X 99 times - and I guess most people want X too. So just because you 'think' gentoo users don't like X, does not make it true at all. Here, even tho I'm on an always-on Internet connection, I boot to initlevel 2, nonetwork, and without X as well. I start all services (including named and privoxy, which are normally of use only when the net's up, but don't require it; they start fast enough) except ntp/ntp- client and the network they depend on. This way, if I'm just doing local admin work, say backups, or doing a git-bisect/build/install/reboot cycle while debugging a kernel regression, I get a faster boot, and don't end up constantly connecting to the NTP servers I sync to, every time I reboot. and for most people such a runlevel would be very, very useless. Add to that that after a boot you have to log in as root and then switch to the right boot level - another 20seconds lost. *snip the rest because it is too long to read and usual duncan talk*. a) yes we know you have great hardware b) the topic was 'how to boot faster' and not 'how to make everything suck the duncan way'. Why fiddle around with breaky scripts, if kdm, gdm, whatever can do that for you? In a proven and stable way? And why booting into a useless runlevel (and a runlevel without network is useless, for doing root stuff - except everything is broken) and then start all the stuff you need manually? Sounds really, really stupid. c) putting X in boot is something even gentoo devs do. So not only stupid users are 'infected' with that meme d) command line and X are not exclusive. In fact - konsole beats the shit out io vts in every aspect. And I can have a lot more konsole sessions then vt's.
[gentoo-amd64] Re: boottime
Richard Freeman [EMAIL PROTECTED] posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:53:51 -0500: Let's be nice. I'll confess I often don't read everything duncan types, For those topics I'm interested in I find his perspective helpful. Even if I don't always agree with everything he posts there is often some useful stuff in there. I still use his CFLAGS 80% of the time. Thanks... Regardless, your post would have stood just fine on its own without the personal attacks. That applies to me to some extent as well. It wasn't obviously personal as I kept it generally worded and allowed exceptions for X in default (just not in boot), but I could have cushioned it with an explicit disclaimer to the effect that it was /not/ targeted at anyone specifically and was simply my opinion. IOW, maybe my post didn't go to the personal attack degree his did, but I did sort of ask for it as it could have been worded better even if saying the same thing, and could/should really learn something from the results of the exchange as well. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master. Richard Stallman
