Daniel Pittman wrote:
Jake Anderson <ya...@vapourforge.com> writes:
Morgan Storey wrote:
Are any of the hardware features lost with eeebuntu though? Like the wifi,
or quick start?
All worked for me, Somebody released a custom kernel for it,
(basically stripped out loads of hardware drivers) took a good 10-15
seconds off the boot time.
Do you have a link to the discussion about that kernel, and which
changes were made?
I am very curious, because the Ubuntu kernel builds very little in-core,
and uses modules for almost all hardware. It then uses udev, which
responds to the actual hardware detected and loads only the drivers that
correspond to the hardware *present*.
The effect of that, of course, is that there is no cost[1] except for
disk space for those additional drivers.
The only place I can see this making a real difference would be through
the bootloader: Ubuntu, by default, places drivers for all common
hardware in the initramfs.
This means that your system is portable to different drive controllers,
can handle USB and network stuff, and so forth without needing to
rebuild the boot stuff.
It also means that the initramfs image is larger, which could contribute
to a slower boot time if you cut it down from ~ 8.5MB — but that
shouldn't be more than a few seconds from any sort of SSD hardware...
So, yeah: I am very curious to know what the custom kernel did that
actually made a difference to boot time. Stripping drivers /shouldn't/
have done anything at all.
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] Technically, this ignores the cost of reading module dependency
information for the extra drivers, more options to match, and the
extra directory information to read when finding the driver.
If those made any *significant* difference to your boot time,
though, you have already eliminated the 99 percent that is spent
doing, well, anything else. :)
Not off hand, I had a bit of a poke around, i think it was comparing the
stock ubuntu kernel Vs the array kernel (running eeexubuntu i think).
I had 2 identical 701 machines, both with clean installs, I put the
array kernel onto one of them and when booting simultaneously the array
kernel was at the login prompt about 10 seconds faster than the stock
kernel. This is going from a hazy ish memory of the time difference but
it was a definite improvement. With some other tweaks it was getting
closeish to the stock xandros boot time.
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