Linux System - Speeding up bootup

[Ynog]

Question here concerning boot up time for a linux system.

I have a linux system and I looking for things to speed up the boot process.
Now one problem is the system will never be rebooted, so everytime it boots up,
its going to be from a hard shutdown. Loss of power,, or system failure.

I'd appreciate any thoughts people might have on things to be done to speed up
the system.

Thanks

 

[rjain]

uninstall all those server daemons you don't need, which create loads of security holes when people find exploits and you don't update to the fixed versions.

For the FS issue, use a journalled FS with a repair tool like XFS.

 

[Nothinman]

If you're using a journaled FS you won't have to worry about fsck time, XFS recovers in <1s for all my filesystems. The only thing you can do after that is try to slim down what starts up as much as possible.

There was an article on the IBM Deverloperworks site on speeding up booting by using make to paralellize service startup but I believe it was pretty involved as you pretty much have to work out the service dependencies on your own and write make files for them.

 

[drag]

Like Raijn said, just disable the stuff you don't need.

Most distros come with some sort of configuration application, so use that to disable stuff like apache, ftpd, lpd (printer) or whatever services you don't use.

 

[ProviaFan]

Recompiling the kernel and leaving out things that you won't use may save you a short bit of bootup time, but I doubt it would do much.

 

[rjain]

forget about configuring what you run and what you don't, just uninstall server software that you have no use for.

jliechty:
what else but booting the kernel and starting services is there to startup time? of course removing unnecessary stuff done in the only two components of system startup will speed up startup time to whatever one should expect for the stuff the machine is doing.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: rjain
forget about configuring what you run and what you don't, just uninstall server software that you have no use for.

jliechty:
what else but booting the kernel and starting services is there to startup time? of course removing unnecessary stuff done in the only two components of system startup will speed up startup time to whatever one should expect for the stuff the machine is doing.

Yes. However, in my experience, modularizing stuff that you don't need frequently combined with removing stuff that you don't use only shaves a second or two off kernel loading and hardware detection time, so I leave it up to the reader to determine whether that's worthwhile or not. I do compile a new customized kernel, but that's just because I want to live on the bleeding edge (I run the 2.6 test series right now ); if it were only for bootup time improvements, I personally wouldn't bother with the effort.

 

[rjain]

scsi detection can take almost a minute if all the drivers are compiled in. Kind of pointless, since few systems have all the different scsi adapters in them (if they even have one).