[Sussex] BIOS no-more (hooray?)

[Geoff Teale]

Angelo wrote:
-------------
> Does that mean that we will get faster bootup times?

Not implicitly, no.   If you want fast booting you need a smaller OS (or at
least a differently structured one) and you need to have it do fewer things
by default at boot time.

On the first point:
BeOS and QNX boot so quickly you can miss it if you're not watching
carefully.  This OS's are microkernels and they only need to load a few k of
kernel before switching out to user-mode, any OS services that are required
above basic process and memory management are loaded on demand - so very few
things need to happen at first - infact in text-mode with no network support
QNX booting (after POST) is nearly instant.

Linux by comparison is a hulking great Monolithic kernel (the relative
benfits of Monolithic and Micro Kernels have been discussed on this list
extensively so I do not propose to start that discussion again now), and
takes a long time to load in.  

On the second point:
Go through the daemons you are starting up at boot time and work out if you
_really_ need them all.  Most distro start everything they think you might
possibly need (this is what Windows does to) - effectively your running lots
of processes you may not need - this has a number of disadvantages:


0\ Booting up takes longer.
1\ CPU time is being wasted.
2\ Memory and swap space are being wasted.
3\ The more processes are running the more likley something is to crash
hideously.
4\ The more processes are running the more likley you are to have an
available security hole.

The lesson here (and I know I sound like a stuck record)... don't run
daemons you don't need!

Finally.. if booting quickly is your greatest desire - don't run xdm, gdm or
kdm at startup.. simple as that, they'll force X to start before you can log
in - this takes quite a bit of time.

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to
make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to
life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral."
   - Richard M Stallman

   


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