Speeding up Ubuntu 11.04 boot time

Just because I have nothing else to do on a lazy, rainy Sunday morning I thought it would be fun to see how much I can slash off the startup time for Ubuntu 11.04 64Bit on my HP Probook 4720s. The OS boots from a class 6 SD card (16 Mbyte/sec read) and 6 GB RAM.Apart from the standard setup the laptop is also running Virtualbox, Mysql and winbind.

Measuring progress

Bootchart is a nice package that protocols meticulously the entire boot process and creates graphical charts of the times and where they are spent. So the first step is getting bootchart:

sudo apt-get install bootchart

After rebooting, you can get aforementioned chart in /var/log/bootchart. A word of caution: the first chart is non-representative, as ureadahead is in profiling mode and slows things down. After another reboot the chart would look much better. And that is how it looks like:

The chart shows three milestones: the X-Window manager starts at 19 seconds after boot, Gnome at 41seconds and the desktop is visible at 59 seconds, which I’ll consider also the entire time of the boot. That’s the time to beat.

Parallelizing Ureadahead

Ureadahead takes about 10 seconds to finish filling the cache, during that time nothing else loads. This makes sense for a regular, rotational harddisk as the frequent head movements induced by processes booting in parallel would slow things down. But since this installation is booting from an SD card, it might be worth exploring a way to run ureadahead in parallel. My first take was to put ureadahead in a script and launch it in the background:

/etc/init.d/bootopts


#!/bin/sh

(/sbin/ureadahead --daemon)&

and change /etc/init/ureadahead.conf to call this script instead of /sbin/ureadahead . The reboot is 3 seconds faster which are gained somewhere between booting X and booting Gnome. Disappointingly, the new chart shows that ureadahead is still running sequentially stalling everything after it. Some investigation shows that the I/O scheduler thinks that the SD card is a rotational device, so I’m changing the bootopts script to correct that by adding:

echo 0 > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-1/2-1.4/2-1.4:1.0/host6/target6:0:0/6:0:0:0/block/sdb/queue/rotational

Note that the SD card is /dev/sdb After rebooting, the chart looks like this:

Much better, ureadahead runs now in parallel. Unfortunately it made the boot process 1 sec slower, mainly delaying X and Gnome. But I feel I am on to something, so let’s not just give up.

Tweaking flashcard readahead 

Some bechmarks with a simple hdparm -t -T on the flash card shows that a sequential read times with 14 MB/sec, thus 2 MB/sec short of it’s nominal classification. The reason seems to be a read-ahead setting of 256, reducing it to 128 gets the maximum of 16 MB/sec. Thus another addition to my bootopts script: 

hdparm -a128 /dev/sdb 

Correcting the I/O scheduler 

Another reboot later, I’m back to 56sec. I suspect that the I/O scheduler gives ureadahead the same priority as to other processes, which it really shouldn’t so it should be hidden behind an ionice, thus a I modify bootopts:

(/usr/bin/ionice -c 3 /sbin/ureadahead –daemon)&


This improves boot time by another 2 sec. The chart reveals that the flash card is still not utilised fully, so I follow these instructions to disable journaling on the boot partition and I also disable plymouthd which is the animated bootscreen. And that does the trick, time is now down to 45 sec:

[update 2011.05.22]
I also did an experiment in the opposite direction, namely starting ionice with -c 1 which corresponds to realtime I/O which reduced startup time by another second. While at first this seems counterintuitive since fewer processes can run in parallel, at a second glance it makes sense because parallel I/O introduces some overhead.

Deferring services

Now let’s defer services not needed for the boot process to after login. My candidates:

mysqld
nmbd
smbd
cupsd
modem-manager
bluetoothd
alsa-store [update 2011.05.22]
alsa-restore [update 2011.05.22]
pulseaudio [update 2011.05.22]
rsync [update 2011.05.22]
apparmor – I apt-get removed that one [update 2011.05.22]

plymouthd [update 2011.05.22] I deleted the /etc/init/plymouthd*.conf files – arguably this will affect logging and the ability of services to interact with the user in case something goes wrong. Use at your own risk
ufw (firewall, there is a small security risk when setting up later) [update 2011.05.22]
acpi-support 
All of these have upstart jobs and can be deferred by changing the start event in the respective /etc/init/xyz.conf files to something like “stuff-that-can-wait”. 
apport [update 2011.07.07]
 

A new script in /etc/init.d/stuff-that-can-wait can then execute these  scripts. Mine looks like this:

And of course not to forget: 

Running init scripts in parallel

Nice post here [update 2011.05.22]
The essence is to modify /etc/init.d/rc to

CONCURRENCY=shell

Taming laptop mode tools [update 2011.05.22]

#!/bin/sh
exit0

(I probably could just have deleted it)

This one not only slashed a whopping 10 seconds off the bootchart but also the Unity Desktop built up noticeably faster.