UniPup boots faster

I have built UniPup 410 and compared the boot time from CD with the official Puppy 4.1.

UniPup: 46 seconds
4.1: 53 seconds

The main reason UniPup is faster is because it doesn't have an 'init' script. Just like a full-hd installation of Puppy, the first script that executes is 'rc.sysinit'.

However, UniPup is slowed by the loading time of the bigger 'initrd.gz' file. I have built this UniPup with a separate 'usr_410.sfs', but intitrd.gz has everything else, including all the kernel modules. I intend to cut down the modules somewhat.

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Comments

Test comment
Username: BarryK2
Test comment, to make sure commenting still works after upgrading PPLOG to v1.1b. S**t, it doesn't work. Trying with a new Author name.

Another test comment
Username: BarryK2
"Another test post.

RamPup by wanderer
Username: Raffy2
"Wanderer in the forum has been posting about RamPup since last year, see http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23103 and his recent one http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34088 I don't know how his approach differs from UniPup's.

Unipup on Puppylinux.org
Username: lobster2
"[img]http://tmxxine.com/movies/anim1.gif[/img] Did you get my interview questions? - if you do not wan to be interviewed that is fine. I hope Unipup will find a place on the community website, linked perhaps to your own site. Enclosed is a test image

Slowdown at searching for personal save file
Username: _Leon_
"Barry, Why such a slowdown at searching for personal save file when a path is already specified with the 'psubdir' parameter in a menu.lst file? If I remember right, Dougal significantly enhanced boot speed for Pup214R - Revisited, made by Dougal and Pakt. My menu.lst boot settings: title Puppy-2.14.r1.01 rootnoverify (hd0,4) kernel /p214r101/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 pmedia=idehd psubdir=p214r101 initrd /p214r101/initrd.gz boot title Puppy-4.10.21 rootnoverify (hd0,4) kernel /p41021/vmlinuz pmedia=idehd psubdir=p41021 initrd /p41021/initrd.gz boot Search times for personal save file between this two boot messages: 'Looking for Puppy in hda1... hda2... hda5... hda6... hda7... hda8...' and 'Using personal data file /p214r1/pup_save.2fs which is on partition hda5' on my computer: Puppy-2.14.r1.01 - less then 1 second Puppy-4.10 - 15 seconds

Test comment
Username: BarryK
"Ok, I deleted the file that holds the usernames and passwords. Now, it is starting from scratch. This comment should now work.

Confirm commenting works
Username: BarryK
"Now trying a second comment, with my new username and password...

!Blog comment doesn't work in IE7!
Username: disciple
""Why such a slowdown at searching for personal save file when a path is already specified with the 'psubdir' parameter in a menu.lst file?" I haven't tried 4.1, but I wondered exactly that for 4.0 - it seems to take forever looking for a save file. BTW you posted about a 29s boot time back in April or something - or maybe that was a different machine :)

Make boot fast
Username: Jesse
"There are some optimization methods that seems to work quite well. The article is for specific hardware, but strategies mentioned can certainly be used for a multipurpose hardware iso distro. LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

Boot Speed
Username: Dougal
"I've managed to speed things up on my installation on the Classmate. I've cut down the time from starting rc.sysinit until X is up to about 12.5 seconds, but there are things that are pretty much out of our control: - Starting X takes me 4 seconds (that's from the moment xinit is run until .xinitrd _starts_ to execute).(that's _with_ readahead) - The kerenl init stage (when you see the "Uncompressing Linux... botting the kernel" message and have a blinking cursor...) takes something like 8 seconds - The 4 seconds to wait for usb-storage to finish scanning... I think the "5 second boot" guys did some serious cutbacks in order to get there... that might be why they seem to ignore requests to show their kernel config file.

slowdown searching for personal save file
Username: icpug
"The reason for this (in version 3 at least) was that the init script did NOT go directly to the psubdir to look for the save file. It searched everywhere and then filtered the results keeping the ones that were in psubdir. It did the same thing with PDEV1 as well. Consequently there was little speed up at all. There is scope to make things a lot better. Changing the search for PDEV1 was pretty easy. I could not see how to change the search for psubdir easily - but then I am not very good!

For 2x or 4x CD/DVD boot speedup
Username: rrolsbe
"Read my posts (rrolsbe) regarding CD/DVD boot speedup. http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=18935 Regards Ron

Lightning boot
Username: capoverde
"One of my test boxes, half as fast as my newest one, boots with Puppy 4.1 in 24 seconds from CD, even less from HD (full install). I've been told that comes from the chipset: hardware experts (like forum member Sage) know which are the speedy ones. BTW, I've read that most laptops have a battery-low emergency routine that copies all RAM to a temporary HD file, which gets copied back to RAM at the following boot. The previous session is almost immediately active -- without new hardware detection, of course. Couldn't that be an option for lightning-fast HD boot? (Or maybe I'm missing some key point?)

FIVE Second boots in non-Puppy Linux!
Username: Springer
"FYI (because it seems not many people here know the current state-of-the-art in fast-booting Linux), Intel recently did some very interesting work that reduced boot times for full desktop-user Ubuntu and Fedora to under FIVE SECONDS on an Asus EeePC with SSD. Note that the profiling methods and tools these guys developed should also work in Puppy, and I would expect this approach could slash Puppy's boot time to only a few seconds even when booting from hard disk rather than SSD. Here are a few links relating to this exciting new project: LWN Article on five-second booting and how it's done: http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ Slides from the Linux Plumbers Conference on how Intel got Five-Second-Booting working (PPT only, unfortunately, but worth the trouble to look at): http://www.fenrus.org/plumbers_fastboot.ppt Interview with one of the developers of the profiling tool: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/09/how-powertop-latencytop-and-fi.html I'd love to see what Puppy could do after applying all these tricks!

Unipup
Username: iscraigh (Craig)
"Barry I have tried Unipup on an Acer Aspire One, I did not get past the bootup it hung @ detecting multimedia hardware....keyboard mouse etc. I tried it on my desktop and it functioned correctly. As you have intimated you are targeting this @ nettops like the aspire one I would be glad to beta test for you. The other major issue I have come across with puppy and the aspire is the failure to properly mount the internal sd drive. This also causes me to be unable to do a hardrive install. If I can assist in any way please ask. Craig

Tags: puppy