Boot Ubuntu 9.04 In 18 Seconds (With A Solid State Drive)

Wow that pretty impressive. Too bad I don't have a SSD.

bradL

Seems like SSD's have a solid future in notebook drives.

*Pardon the pun*

ThePioneer

@$393 to $595.

danger the pirate ★♥ has a fake star and a fake heart. (thanks bosskev!)

Nice. Wish I had a SSD.

On the subject of Ubuntu and boot times, what could I do to tweak the speed of the boot process, or any general speed tweaks, for Ubuntu 8.10, seeing how I just installed it on my laptop?

Also, would updating to 9.04 be beneficial, or should I just stick with 8.10, seeing how I'm working off of a P.O.S. Laptop? (Dell Latitude 110L)

I *just* got my first 128gb SSD ($270CAN) and threw it in my tower last night.
This got me pretty excited for the dual boot I have planned for tonight.

@danger the pirate ★♥ has a fake star and a fake heart. (tha...: oops, those prices arent even for the extreme edition. it looks like he spent ~$800.

danger the pirate ★♥ has a fake star and a fake heart. (thanks bosskev!)

He could probably trim it even more by removing the boot splash which takes another second or two to load. If you look around the netbook forums you will find all sorts of tricks to make bootup faster.

post_break

I'm impressed. Makes me want to make the switch back to ubuntu again...

@bradL: Impressive indeed. I wonder how many seconds it will shave of my boot time on XP.

dragonskin

@Khaavren: what make and where?

@xAnarChisTx: Im too lazy to go get my laptop in the other room, but In 8.10 i believe your startup processes are listed under system/preferences/sessions. Theyve renamed it to something else in 9.04, i think it may be startup apps or something akin to that.

I'm anxious to see how well 9.04 will boot on my Dell Mini 9 when I get my Runcore SSD in a month or so.

It takes over 90 seconds from power-on to wireless connection with auto-login and a 3 second GRUB time on Ubuntu 8.10 and Dell's crap stock SSD.

Great, he removed security (auto login) for better boot times.

I'm all for removing splash screens and grubs countdown (though I would not push it to 0, what if you need into it later?) to lower boot times. But removing security? From a portable device that can grow legs and walk off? No.

None of my laptops have any data you can get to without a password. Either encrypted containers or the entire drive is encrypted. Or like the laptop I am currently on, both. (Work Laptop, and I could be carrying around your medical records. Don't bitch that I am being "too paranoid")

I am hoping this is truly just a test to see how fast he can get his machine to boot, and not something he is going to do as standard practice.

operator207

@[www.madshrimps.be] , Windows 7 makes similar time on an SSD.

Looked to me more like 23 seconds to fully boot up and launch FF. But who's counting.

HTB

That's pretty quick, but I'm running the beta of fedora 11 and it seems to boot quicker; it takes about 13-15 on my 7200 rpm laptop drive. I have it going to runlevel 3, though.

darkstar misses his preview button

@operator207: You're being too paranoid. And my medical records are boring.

protospork

@operator207: If the point of the demonstration is to show the time from power on to a functional Firefox, the login screen is an arbitrary delay that has nothing to do with how fast the machine is. In the real world you don't want auto login, you also probably wouldn't have Firefox load on login.

Cormophyte

@operator207: That's fine and dandy, but that misses the point, he was aiming for a fast boot which is obvious.

You shouldn't be running around with personal information on a laptop, encrypted or not that violates just about every single policy I have ever worked under. I would like to know who it is you work for.

Lastly, if you use encrypted containers why does the login matter? Obviously you have no idea what you're talking about, because getting a login is the easy part.

The geek in me aside, I still don't get this obsession with reducing the booting time (for any OS for that matter). Are the few precious seconds I save supposed to amount to anything? Did I miss the study that revealed that "OMGWTFBBQ!! you collectively save XX number of years of your life by cutting down the time to boot your systems!"?

Then again, this is Lifehacker and this is just something to do.

@will52: The dist doesn't really matter.

Wait, I don't get it. I thought Ubuntu was supposed to be so stable and so awesome that you would almost never need to turn it off. If you almost never need to turn it off, then why worry about boot up time? I'd gladly take an OS that takes 15 minutes to load if it means that it will never crash or fail ever.

applesanity

Could not use a cf/sd card? to load kernel? 18 secs does not sound that fast

neergrm

@darkstar misses his preview button: OMG IF YOU RUN UBUNTUZ IT SO FASTER!!!

RH love since 4.2

Who cares about boot time? We barely reboot our machines, and when we do, 20 seconds is pretty much irrelevant.

There are much, much more important things they could be working on.

Fixing hibernate/suspend, for instance, would make boot time even more irrelevant. Why not work on the things in this list, guys?

[brainstorm.ubuntu.com]

I just purchased a refurb dell latitude e4300 w/ 128GB SSD for just over $900. Last night I finally installed 9.04 and was amazed at how fast it could boot and connect to my wifi. It's funny, and kinda freaky, that when I woke up today there's an article about the same exact thing.

Dell Outlet refurbs FTW, check em out next time you're buying a laptop.

bigbri9

@will52: Seriously? The only reason you're not using Ubuntu is the boot time?

@applesanity: It's not that stable, unfortunately...

@applesanity: Ubuntu LTS versions are.

v9.xx is not considered a stable release for production environments by the Ubuntu team. The genius of the release cycle is that they let anyone who wants to be on the edge, easily live there. For example, 8.10 is too new for my tastes. When the next LTS version comes out, I'll wait 6 months for any tiny remaining issues to be solved.

EXT4 - I won't be using that for at least 4 years. But I'm picky about my data. I like keeping it. File systems need to be time proven for me.

Don't get me wrong, I ran the latest, greatest and patch my own kernels with custom code for years. I added JFS into Linux as soon as IBM made the port available. Thankfully, I don't need to do that anymore. In fact, I avoid installing anything that isn't in the default depots - even when it may be painful to **not** do something custom.

Every OS needs to be rebooted when there's a kernel change. Linux/Ubuntu isn't any different. Just for fun, here's a few uptimes pulled a few minutes ago.

Prod:$ uptime
10:29:08 up 17 days, 16:09, 6 users, load average: 2.00, 1.98, 1.42

Test:$ uptime
10:33:19 up 17 days, 5 min, 2 users, load average: 0.15, 0.26, 0.20

Laptop:$ uptime
10:32:10 up 7 days, 21:25, 4 users, load average: 2.32, 1.54, 0.90

I long time ago, running slackware, we had uptimes in the 280 day range. Is that good? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Security patches trump uptime goals here.

TheFu

@applesanity: Do you not ever turn your laptop off? If so, where did you get your fuel cell / extension cord?

bigbri9

@rogsim: I usually turn my computer on and go take a shower in the morning, so unless my bootup time was ungodly slow, I wouldn't notice, even if it were 18 seconds (which it's not).

Platypus Man

@operator207: It depends on who you are. Yeah, I have some personal stuff that could mess me up if it got in the wrong hands, but my laptop just isn't in the situation where it would get stolen, short of someone breaking into my place and taking it. But I'm not worried about that.

So yeah, if you think you need a password, then you probably do. But I don't think I need one, so I don't have one. I don't think you're paranoid, but that doesn't mean that everyone always needs a password on their laptop.

And yeah, as Cormophyte pointed out, he's probably just doing it to be faster. I'm sure he's not going to go around in his day-to-day life like that, unless he always wants to run Firefox within 18 seconds of turning on his machine.

Platypus Man

That's disappointing.

I run Vista, on a normal, nothing fancy HDD, and get 25 seconds until FF is open and running.
What.

@ThePioneer: *canned laughter*

Yeah, that and the fact they're resistant to knocks, by virtue of not having moving pieces, means they'll quickly find a calling there.

@xAnarChisTx: If you do a fresh Jaunty installation with ext4 format you will definitely notice a major improvement in boot time and probably overall performance (I just updated my desktop machine to Jaunty, and it's snappier even with an ext3 encrypted LVM).

zoomZAP

@bigbri9: I believe this is referring to cold-booting, as opposed to restoring from a suspended state.

I'm running Jaunty on 2 machines at home and it is nice. Mine doesn't boot that fast running off WD1TB SATAII Drive though. The thing I don't get is how everybody is always going off about how fast SSDs are and yet my WD does real world 750M/s access and the best I can get off USB SSDs is 30M/s - Why do people think these things are fast?
P.

powel212

what drive was it tho?
im guessing a sata2 interface but what make was it?

Smiling_Gandalf

a $300 hard drive to have a free OS boot faster? ill just wake vista and be ready in 12 seconds...

@xAnarChisTx: Honestly, I have a POS laptop too (gateway ml3109), and every release of Ubuntu has run BETTER then the last. By that I mean just as fast (if not faster), and with more working right out of the box. I'm definitely going to upgrade, but your mileage may vary.

RashidaGalolahere

@darkstar misses his preview button:

Runtime 3 vs runtime 5 will shave off a few seconds, depending on your graphic card. (Since Fedora 11 supports Kernal Mode Setting, which probably cuts 1-2 seconds out of the X startup)

That said, I have heard great things about Fedora 11.. I've never used a redhat distro outside of work.. I'm tempted to try it out once it gets out of beta.

soleblaze

I can't wait til I get a laptop with an SSD. That is pretty badass.

Eschguy

@D0rk:

9.04 has a significant boot time decrease from 8.10. I'm running the jaunty netbook remix beta on my Mini 9. I haven't done any tweaking, and it boots to login in about 18 seconds. This is with the 16GB SSD that dell uses (70MB/s read.. 30MB/s write)

soleblaze

One thing to note about this boot is that his laptop is an older Thinkpad, which only uses SATA 1. SSD drives are fast enough to max out SATA 1, so he might not be getting the full speed potential.

I have an HP DV3510nr (The best buy blue plate special) with a OCZ Vertex. Now it looks like this HP maxes out at around 200MB/s reads (the drive should be hitting 220-250). My bootcharts show 9.01 seconds to gdm login.. and gdm login to desktop takes about a second. The only tweaks I've done is turning some processes off that I don't use, such as bluetooth and CUPS. I also disabled readahead.

Funny enough, readhead and sreadahead increase my boot times by about 2 seconds.

With the Kernel, it takes about 2.5 seconds to load. (I did a custom 2.6.29 kernel to get this lower..but it managed to increase my overall boot time by about 1 second).. And of course BIOS load times are around 8 seconds.. so it's about 20 seconds from power button to login screen for me.

soleblaze

@powel212: USB SSDS. You mean thumb drives? Yeah, the high end ones max out at 30-35MB/s.. However, current SATA SSDs max out at around 250MB/s reads and 200MB/s writes.

soleblaze

Maybe this is a silly question, but why could we not save the drive "state," like you can do with OS virtualization softwares? What about actual hardware prevents this from happening? For instance, I can quit a VirtualBox machine into a saved state (which, granted, takes a couple minutes to save), and then restart it from that saved state, which takes only a couple seconds. Is this impossible with actual hardware / OSes?

jrc03c

Here is a really good article on SSD's that everyone should read.

[www.anandtech.com]

pand0ra

interesting, i didn't know bios screens could be removed

@bradL: SSD store memory in static, like flash disks. I think thats another word for not reliable for OS.

@endolith:

Yes it is, you silly man!

Joshiii-Kun

@zoomZAP: Do you have any insight on ext4 vs. jfs? I chose jfs after speed-testing it against ext3, reiser and xfs on my particular hardware, but I did not try ext4.

kc2idf

@post_break: Agreed, but that might not be the point. If he stripped off X and booted straight to command line it would have been faster, but what's the point? Most people use the splash, so it makes sense to see how fast it boots on the stock installation.

kd420

I wonder how it'd perform on my x300 with my SSD drive...

I know what I'll be doing in a week or two.

Sean Young

@bradL: Just became jealous

metalmarious

Heh. Loaded up my Eee pc (with SSD) with jaunty a few weeks back, been enjoying the short boot times quite a lot. don't even bother with standby. just switch it off.

Alfonzo

@endolith: no completely not. Just jogged my memory is all. I love ubuntu but its hard to learn Visual Basic on (yes i am aware of the work arounds).

@jrc03c: Yep. Commonly referred to as "Hibernate." The act of saving the RAM (virtual or real) to the HDD.

th89

The race is on--just booted my custom Slax in 12.2 seconds from USB on an old XPS 140 Dell laptop. Instant wireless and what more to say?

rainbowsky

@rainbowsky: That it's a distro meant to be used off a USB or Live CD? Comparing a Live Distro and an actual production distro is completely different. As much as I love Slax (and I do), Ubuntu blows it out of the water when it comes to productivity.

BTW, just installed 9.04 and got a 16 second boot off my POS 4500 RPM drive. Beat that. Booted, auto-login, and w/ Firefox, wireless, OpenOffice, and Geany already open.

Kunal Sarkhel

@will52:
It's the G-Skill 128gb GSK FM-25S2S ($235US)
Got it from Newegg.ca on sale.

Unfortunately the first time they shipped it, it was an empty box, but they rectified that with G.Skill as soon as they could via claim.

@will52: You may be aware of SOME workarounds, but have you tried:
1) Not using Visual Basic?
2) Using something other than Visual Basic?
3) Using C++?

/trolling

but honestly, is there anything that can be done with Visual Basic that can't be just as well or better with another programming language?

Just upgraded from 8.10 to 9.04 on a amd 64 and dropped my time from 2 minutes to the internet (minus bios screen) to 1 minute 30 seconds, not bad.

bullfroghrr

@MuglyTheWorm: I came to say this, more or less. I can't bring myself to ditch my mechanical drives just for a moderate performance increase. When 500GB SSDs are $90, absolutely. In the meantime, I make much use of hibernation when powering of laptop for longer periods; sleep/standby if just switching locations inside 30 minutes. or so.

nolabar10der

@Phoshi: My boot's on all my computers in the last few years have always hovered from 20 to 35 seconds.
Ubuntu, XP, Windows 7, Vista.

I never spend any time thinking about my boot speed, never had too. What's the big deal?

@HTB: Haha I thought the same thing. UNTIL I READ THE POST.

"after removing his ThinkPad's BIOS screen wait"

:)

@operator207: You can take all my computers. All safely in google's mist.

@acehigh88: Flash memory lifespan still hasn't been determined. If you want your OS to run for 10+ years, or aren't smart enough to back up CRITICAL files to CD/DVD, then you deserve to lose data. I've seen HDs die in 1-2 years...and flash has NO moving parts to wear out (like HD bearings)...

VanceArgeius

@peregrinefalc0n: (in case you're too lazy to click, my 32gb SSD was $95). all SSDs are much, much faster than any HDD.

peregrinefalc0n

@[www.newegg.com]) and i get comparable results (my windows XP professional boots up in 28 seconds, but thats including BIOS time, like Cutts' timer). :D i highly recommend using SSDs for everyone.

peregrinefalc0n

woops...wrong place for the reply. Damn.

nolabar10der

Many of you asking about why we should care about boot times are missing the obvious: laptops. Really, a large portion of the comments complaining about the focus on boot time somehow missed this? I cycle mine all through the day or night. The one that sits on my desk or only gets moved around the house almost never cycles, but my road warrior...hello?

nolabar10der

@peregrinefalc0n: I wouldn't say "much much" faster. Some are barely faster at all. Plus SSD's are a long way off from storing 1.5TB at a reasonable cost.

Angry Numismatist

@endolith: On my HTPC that has tuner cards in it, DVD/bluray drive ect boot time is paramount. As it replaces the DVD player and the HD Set top box (HDTV doesn't have an inbuilt tuner) it has to boot quickly. So it does.

Thomas Hambleton

@endolith:

Never heard of global warming? TURN OFF YER MACHINE!

Computers in suspend use quite a bit of energy, in the aggregate.

Ubuntu at least has an eye on the environment, unlike some other OS's that never want you to turn off the computer.

perspectoff

This still doesn't convince me that the price premium for SSDs is worth it. Though I am curious how a large capacity 7200rpm 2.5" drive boots into Jaunty under the same configuration.

nortexoid

@operator207: And do you think those OS passwords actually do anything? Anyone can pull your drive out of your system and access the drive from their own OS. Even BIOS passwords are mostly useless, since the CMOS batteries are most mainboards (including on laptops) are easily accessible, once someone gets a hold of your computer. If you're really concerned about security then you'll encrypt the files themselves.

nortexoid