On 12/1/08, Darrick Hartman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Philip H W Schroth wrote: > > > Is it normal that astlinux 0.6.2 takes about 1 min and 40 seconds on my > > alix board? > > > > Askozia takes only 15 seconds. > > > Yes. Hook up a serial cable and you'll see why. During the boot > process, an initial boot loader (runnix) loads. That looks into the > 'os' directory for the Astlinux.run and .run.sha1 files. It does an > sha1sum check on the run file and checks that against the .run.sha1 file > before it actually loads Astlinux. This allows for automated updates in > the field. > > If you have one or two Astlinux boxes, upgrading can be simple, but if > you have 10 or 15 and many of them more than an hour drive away, it's > much easier to upgrade. Simply copy the correct files into the 'os' > directory and reboot. > > I was initially put off by the longer boot time, but the benefit > outweights the delay in my case. > > It's still faster than several other commercial pbx systems. > > > Darrick >
I'm glad this came up. The current boot system was implemented with the desire to have almost foolproof remote upgrade capabilities. Runnix is a good start to this. While the time to boot has always been of some concern up to this point very little effort has been put into speeding up this process. Some areas for improvement: - Strip the runnix kernel down a bit. The current runnix kernel is EXTREMELY generic, offering support for anything 386 and up with support for just about every ethernet controller, most disk controllers, etc. It takes at least a few extra seconds to probe for the various controllers. This hardware support could probably be scaled back a bit. - Speed up the sha1sum, skip it, etc. - Make the runnix output quiet. In my own basic tests one of the slowest parts of the boot process is sending kernel boot output to a serial port. Adding "quiet" to the runnix boot params can shorten the output significantly. I usually do this anyway to avoid confusion because yes, it does look like Linux is booting twice (because it is). - Optimize AstLinux startup. There is currently a lot of code that runs on boot. We read rc.conf individually for each startup script and run various shell stuff to generate the relevant configs. This takes time and has nothing to do with runnix. By optimizing some of this code we can improve the overall AstLinux boot time. Not that I'm delegating but this seems like something Philip would be interested in (I'm sure he's brought it up before). If AstLinux were a desktop or consumer-device oriented distro (PVR/DVR/MythTV/etc) boot time would be a priority. The very nature of a PBX or network appliance requires long uptimes and minimal reboots. I know it might take a while to get used to some of the disadvantages of runnix (higher complexity, longer boot times, etc) but once it has saved you from a couple of truck rolls (as Darrick points out) an extra 60 seconds to startup every six months won't seem so bad ;). A very dramatic example is Star2Star's starbox usage. We routinely upgrade customer equipment, often times with no expertise available on site to remedy any potential problems. We've performed (literally) thousands of remote upgrades without ever rendering a machine unbootable. I'm pretty happy with that track record! -- Kristian Kielhofner http://blog.krisk.org http://www.submityoursip.com http://www.astlinux.org http://www.star2star.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Astlinux-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/astlinux-users Donations to support AstLinux are graciously accepted via PayPal to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
