Bootup Time Working Group

 

Working Group Information

Charter

The Bootup Time Working Group shall work to minimize the activation and deactivation times of Linux systems. This includes making improvements in cold start bootup times and shutdown times, as well as improvements in the speed of suspend and resume operations. The Working Group shall establish requirements for Linux systems and sub-systems in order to accomplish this goal of timely activation and deactivation. Also, the Working Group will evaluate and recommend technical solutions and implementations which accomplish this goal.

Scope

The scope of this Working Group includes firmware, operating system kernel, and user space issues. It may include work to accelerate device initialization by means of coordination between the firmware and the OS, work inside the OS to reduce the time to initialize kernel sub-systems and device drivers, and work to increase application startup speed. Also, the Working Group may specify, evaluate or recommend instrumentation and tools for analysing bootup and shutdown times.

The Working Group will not consider compiler technologies related to this issue.

Current Tasks

See the Bootup Time Howto Task List

Documents and information

• Boot-up Time Definition Of Terms - defintions of terms used by the working group
• /\ - no content yet - Boot-up Time Delay Taxonomy - list of delays categorized by boot phase, type and magnitude
• Presentation: - Reducing Startup Time in Embedded Linux Systems This document is a presentation that was prepared based on existing bootup time reduction techniques.
• Kernel Instrumentation - lists some known kernel instrumentation tools. These are of interest for measuring kernel startup time.
• Filesystem Information - information about bootup times with various file systems

Current Projects

Boot-up Time Reduction Howto - this is a project to catalog existing bootup time reduction techniques. Work on this project is under way. The wiki will serve as the primary repository of information gathered for this project.

Specifications

• Timing_APISpecification - requirements (and specification?) for a simple API to support bootup timing measurements
• see also Instrumentation_API for some background research on this API
• Calibrate Delay Avoidance Specification - avoiding the cost of calibrate_delay()
  • Done - see Preset LPJ
• IDE_No_Probe_Specification - force kernel to observe the IDE "noprobe" command line option
• IDE_Preempt_Specification - change IDE busywaits into preemptible timeouts
• Kernel_XIP - support Execute-In-Place for the kernel.

Implementations and/or patches

Measurement Systems

• Printk Times - simple system for showing timing information for each printk
• Kernel Function Instrumentation - more complete system for reporting function timings in the kernel (The patch for this has not been isolated, but it's currently in the CELF tree)

Patches for Reducing Bootup Time

• Preset LPJ - Allow the use of a preset loops_per_jiffy value
• IDE No Probe - Force kernel to observe the ide<x>=noprobe option
• IDE Preempt - Make IDE driver init busywaits preemptible
• Kernel XIP - Allow kernel to be executed in-place in ROM or FLASH (code is not isolated yet, but is in the CELF source tree)

External projects

De-serialized user-space service startups (RC scripts)

• IBM article on on using Makefile techniques to express dependencies between services and support parallel service start. See http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-boot.html?ca=dgr-lnxw04BootFaster
• Richard Gooch project to rewrite boot script system from scratch. Eliminates lots of BSD and SYS V-isms, and introduces dependencies. See http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rgooch/linux/boot-scripts/
• Serel project - for parallelizing service startup. Commands are inserted into RC scripts to cause needed services to start (based on XML database of dependencies). See http://www.fastboot.org/
• LSB specification for comments in RC Scripts which allow parallization. See http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/refspecs/LSB_1.1.0/gLSB/initscrcomconv.html

Kexec

• Kexec is a system which allows a system to be rebooted without going through BIOS. That is, a Linux kernel can directly boot into another Linux kernel, without going through firmware. See the white paper at: http://devloper.osdl.org/rddunlap/kexec/whitepaper/kexec.pdf
• here's another Kexec white paper: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-kexec.html?ca=dgr-lnxw04RebootFast

Pre-Linking and Lazy Linking

• see this excellent paper for an overview of dynamic linking issues: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mwh/papers_DB/ieee_computer97.pdf

Others

• http://www.bootsplash.org/
• http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5907201615.html - any FSM Labs folk have pieces of this?

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Categories:

• Boot Time
• CE Linux Working Groups