BootPerformance

Differences between revisions 20 and 21
Revision 20 as of 2009-03-11 15:51:27
Size: 9037
Editor: quest
Comment:
Revision 21 as of 2009-03-11 15:53:05
Size: 9051
Editor: quest
Comment:
Deletions are marked like this. Additions are marked like this.
Line 49: Line 49:
~+Current Jaunty: [[ attachment:06-jaunty-20090218_25s.png|25sec]]+~ (Includes previous changes with additional improvements. With compiz we are at 30sec).<<BR>> ~+Current Jaunty: [[attachment:black-jaunty-20090310-4.png|25s]] (using compiz)
Line 52: Line 52:
 * [[attachment:06-jaunty-20090218_25s.png|25sec]]+~ (Includes previous changes with additional improvements. With compiz we are at 30sec).<<BR>>
Line 70: Line 71:
 * [[attachment:black-jaunty-20090310-4.png]] 25s

With this being a feature spanning multiple releases, we thought it best to have a single point of reference for all the work we are doing and plan to do in the future.

Rationale

(*pulled from /FoundationsTeam/Specs/BootPerformance)
As time has passed, the boot performance of home computers has steadily worsened; it is not longer unusual for a desktop operating system to take well over a minute to be ready from the time the user first presses the power button.

While this has been somewhat acceptable for desktops, where the user at least expects it to take a long time, increased focus on smaller and more mobile devices means that something needs to be done.

For a netbook or mobile device to be truly useful as a convenient, lightweight, computing platform; the boot must take as little time as possible so that the system is immediately useful for the user. Any longer, and they may as well use their desktop or full laptop.

Use Cases

(*pulled from /FoundationsTeam/Specs/BootPerformance)

  • It should be possible to power off desktops and work stations over night, to conserve power and energy. Lost time in the morning to switch them back on is undesirable.
  • Laptop users want to use their computer as soon as possible without waiting, even though the hardware is lower powered and slower, it should boot quickly.
  • Netbooks are marketed to be convenient and portable Internet and computing devices. They must not take any significant time to boot, otherwise it becomes more likely the owner will simply use their desktop computer instead.
  • For Ubuntu to be suitable for mobile devices such as cell phones, it must boot quickly to give the "instant on" experience most commonly expected with such commodity devices.

Plans for Jaunty (9.04)

Our approach for this release is to look at what we have, profile and chart it, and identify areas for improvement. We will iterate over this process steadily reducing the time it takes for the system to boot. Our goal for this release is to have a fully functional system, i.e. no sneaky backgrounding to make it "appear" booted, up and running in 25sec (or less). Our reference platform is the Dell Mini 9, as it has the Intel Atom processor and an Solid State Drive (SSD) disk, so makes an excellent benchmark for the Netbook form factor.

Detailed Changes

*In No Particular Order

DESCRIPTION

Status

Update the kernel config to improve performance

Done

Optimize the boot up process by parallelizing events where possible

Done

Fix seahorse agent timeout

Done

Investigate why udevadm is taking too long, and improve where possible

Done

Reduce the startup time for compiz

Michael Vogt (mvo) uploaded compiz with profiling support and libcompizconfig with protocol buffer support into the compiz Launchpad PPA, and has seen improvements in startup time. This still needs to be measured on the reference platform. See the associated Feature Freeze Exception

Apply Xserver performance patches found in Moblin image, if applicable

We are currently in communication with Intel's development team working on this. Apparently, a lot of the changes were rejected by upstream as either being untested on non-Intel graphic chipsets or being too netbook specific. See associated Feature Freeze Exception

Mode-switches and console changes are known to be expensive, in addition they create the intermediate VTs, so start usplash and X on tty1

Figure out why we set the hardware clock several different times from different places and fix where possible

Done

Change the nm-applet connecting animation to something that doesn't adversely affect performance

Add new and faster module-init-tools upload that uses binary indexes

Done. See the associated Feature Freeze Exception

Set console font, keymap and utf-8 mode from udev while usplash is running

See associated Feature Freeze Exception

Update X to save the results of xkbcomp rather than regenerating every single time the server is started

See associated Feature Freeze Exception

Eliminate various calls to modprobe in initramfs and initscripts where they're not needed

See associated Feature Freeze Exception

Move some scripts out of rcS and into rc1-5 so they can run while X is up

See associated Feature Freeze Exception

Eliminate some unnecessary init scripts (ie. wacom, powernowd)

See associated Feature Freeze Exception

Fix the hostname tool so an init script is not needed

See associated Feature Freeze Exception

Move from readahead-list to sreadahead

Done See associated Feature Freeze Exception. We need resolve an outstanding issue with sreadhead reducing performance on machines with rotary disks (See associated Feature Freeze Exception. Until this is resolved, we will not use sreadahead by default.

Identify any bottlenecks in the gnome login that we can fix

See associated Feature Freeze Exception

Look at some patches from SuSE that speed up gconf and gnome-settings-daemon

Bootcharts

This section will be updated to show our progress towards our goal of 25sec (or less) for Jaunty on a Dell Mini 9. For reference, we will compare our results to the performance of the latest Moblin v2 development release on a Dell Mini 9. It should be noted that while the boot time is much faster, the current Moblin development image is much more hardware specific than a standard Ubuntu Desktop image, and does not provide certain functionality needed for a Dell Mini 9 netbook, e.g. the wireless adapter is not supported, keyboard mapping not fully functional, etc.

Current MoblinV2: 8sec - Alpha
Current Jaunty: 25s (using compiz)
~+Previous charts (slower)

  • 25sec+~ (Includes previous changes with additional improvements. With compiz we are at 30sec).

  • 30 sec: Includes previous with seahorse fix, and metacity

  • 40 sec: Includes previous with new module-init-tools

  • 56 sec: Jaunty

  • 61 sec: Intrepid with Jaunty Kernel

  • 65 sec: Intrepid

Plans for Karmic (9.10)

Detailed Changes

DESCRIPTION

Status

Switch to rsyslogd as possible alternative to using syslogd and klogd

Convert to Upstart where possible to allow for easier customization around boot performance for UNR and OEMs

Leverage Kernel Mode Switching (KMS) as a way to improve the performance of graphics bring up

Switch to metacity-compositing as "Normal" visual effects setting, with compiz as "Extra"

Move to .30+ kernel for fastboot improvements

Goto compiling kernel for i586/i686 arch support

Bootcharts

This section will be updated to show our progress towards maximizing our performance for Karmic on a Dell Mini 9.

Proof of Concept: 8.5 secs

  • This is a pure Upstart-based boot of Xubuntu, and not intended to represent a standard Ubuntu Desktop

Work with Debian

As usual, we are committed to working with the Debian community to provide patches across all the packages in main that would benefit from our work in this arena. With this in mind we will investigate creating a joint Ubuntu-Debian team to look into what can be done.

FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance (last edited 2009-11-26 16:49:47 by 99-156-85-10)