LtspBootPerformance

Summary

In Dapper we did a big LTSP bootprocess profiling session that resulted in cutting down the bootspeed of thin clients by 30-50% and reducing the memory requirements to 64M without network swapping. Since dapper LTSP has gotten many new features, kernel and nfsroot are grown over time and low end thin client hardware starts slowing down on boot again. During UDS Sevilla a bunch of LTSP profiling sessions will take place to find the slowdown factors. Additionally the kernel config files of the ltsp 4.2 and the current ubuntu i386 image will get compared to find out if there are possible improvements through having a -ltsp kernel package or if we can make the current i386 image less memory hungry and speedier. The possibility of using nfs4 for the nfsroot and possible speedups through that will also get reviewed.

To get data about the boot process, we can use bootchart. Then, we can mesure the improvements done.

Rationale

Use Cases

Scope

Design

Summary

Rationale

Scope and Use Cases

Implementation Plan

Implementation

Using bootchart on a thin-client

Install bootchart into the thin-client root : 

chroot /opt/ltsp/i386
apt-get install bootchart

Quit the chroot and run the update kernel command : 

ltsp-update-kernel

Then, the next time the terminal will boot, the bootchart will be available in /var/log/bootchart as a PNG file.

Outstanding Issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec

LtspBootPerformance (last edited 2008-08-06 16:39:29 by localhost)