On Wednesday 30 Apr 2014 11:08:14 Mike Cloaked wrote:
Just a comment about boot times. The overall boot performance will depend not only on optimising an individual setup, but also is dependent on the hardware as well as which boot manager is being used. So an older laptop with a hard drive, using BIOS boot and optimised will still see much longer boot time than say a new laptop running a fast i7 processor, with an ssd, using UEFI and also optimised. Certainly I have an old laptop that takes around 35 seconds to boot to the login prompt from when the boot manager takes over after POST using BIOS legacy boot, but a similarly set up and optimised new Haswell i7 laptop, with msata ssd using refind for UEFI boot takes about 7 seconds to reach the KDM login prompt. Of course for a specific system it may be possible to shave some seconds off the boot time, but it will also depend on which server daemons need to be started as well. So adding dovecot, an MTA, and maybe a DHCP server all add to the time taken to complete the boot process.
So comparisons of absolute boot times from different machines are difficult to interpret.
Since we're on the topic, does anyone have a clue how I can find out why systemd hangs for ages when I shut down or reboot? The display server is shut down, I'm placed in a TTY with a "shutting-down" message, but then it looks like it's waiting for something that never happens, and then I think I see something flash past about a watchdog timeout before it proceeds. If I could get rid of that hanging step, it would save me waiting 60 seconds or however long each time I reboot (which is infrequently enough that it's only been a mild annoyance so far). What's the correct way to diagnose this? I don't think systemd-analyze can handle shutdown. Could this be an initrd thing? Paul