A couple of links are in order regarding recent progress made in booting a linux system faster. Linux developers Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok gave a presentation at the recent Linux Plumbers conference on booting an Asus eee pc in 5 seconds (video). That's five seconds to usable desktop with processor and disk idle, but no, that doesn't include bios posting. I'm not sure how long that is on a eee. Here's the most detailed article covering the presentation, and here's the ppt itself.

I've been playing around with some of the techniques they used this week. I had pruned my init scripts sometime last year to get a 15 second boot time, though that had climbed up to the 25 second range with my new laptop and new hardware. I've gotten it back down below 20 seconds by applying the available kernel patches in Arjan's fastboot .git tree and modularizing the non-critical part of my kernel. There's three major avenues to pursue to remove more time on my box. I still want to understand why there's a 3 second pause in the kernel loading process that wasn't there on my old laptop. There's a new X.org server that should improve startup time somewhat. I should be able to use super readahead to improve IO throughput in bootup (and possibly preload firefox as well?).

The presentation was done from systems installed with Fedora and Moblin. From what I read, these improvements will end up in most other distributions as well. The kernel patches may make it into 2.6.28 (earlyish 2009), the improvements made to X should make it into the next release of X.org.

I'm putting this all aside for a little while and get back to working on English language processing this weekend; I'll write up more about exactly what I'm doing with that soon. As a target for Wednesday, I'll commit to making significant progress, but I'm in an exploring stage, so I'm won't committing to what that will entail.