Friday, September 08, 2006

 

Trying to integrate Ubuntu's readahead (SoC2006).

I've been playing a bit with Ubuntu's readahead to get a better boot time on debian. At least they seem to get it. I've used strace to get the list of files for different init-scripts and generate the required /etc/readahead/boot file - containing the files to load to memory. The advantage of readahead over preload so far is that it does not affect the boot time when it is not active. I consider readahead inactive when the boot file is empty and preload when the preload script is removed from the symbolic link pools (/etc/rcX.d).

By using readahead shortly after the system starts to boot (near udev), the boot time is even increased by 2 seconds (e.g. S03readahead in /etc/rcS.d). On the other side, by using some of the files used by KDE during startup there is almost a one second improvement as may be seen in the bootchart. We use readahead in /etc/rcS.d position S42. The list of files and the bootcharts may be found here.

Besides, I've corrected the deliverable 5 including the fact that lintian incorporates now a check for lsb compliance based on our patch! The deliverable is available here

Comments:
I think this is a perfect integration, this is what most of us were waiting for because it's a good work, I'd like to share this information with my friends.
 
Wow what a great idea, ubuntu is the operative system of this generation!
 
For me, I start a lot of things when I log into my GNOME session. My laptop
boots from GRUB to GDM in about 14 seconds, but from the moment I log in to a full desktop is nearly 40 seconds, most of the time the disk is seeking like crazy. This led me to wonder, is it possible to extend readahead's benefits to accelerate the login sequence?
 
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