One of the tricks to speed up the boot times is to start a background process as early as possible in the boot, and make it tell the kernel to load from disks the files that is going to be used later in the boot. This increases disk throughput as it is used while the CPU is busy doing other things, and increase CPU throughput as it is able to keep running without waiting for the disk. At least that is the theory. :)
At the moment, I am aware of two such projects for Debian. The preload package (currently in Debian/unstable and /etch), with project pages available from <URL:http://sourceforge.net/projects/preload>, and the readahead package, (currently in Ubuntu), WNPP request at <URL:http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=325885>. There is also the readaheadd, neither in ubuntu nor Debian, with source available from <URL:https://hollowtube.mine.nu/svn/readaheadD>. Which one of these would be best for speeding up the Debian desktop boot? Do we need all of them, just one, or a combination? Anyone got any clues? Are any of you already using the preload package? What about the readahead package? I suspect Debian need some kind of adaptive readahead system, kind of like preload but focused on the boot process. Friendly, -- Petter Reinholdtsen _______________________________________________ initscripts-ng-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/initscripts-ng-devel
