openSUSE will try to reduce boot times to 5 seconds

[eddie]

Distrowatch Weekly in its 203rd issue reports about the recent efforts being made by openSUSE Boot Time group in order to reduce the boot time to 5 seconds

It is no secret that when it comes to system boot, openSUSE is one of the slowest among the major distributions. In order to remedy the situation, the openSUSE community has established a new Boot Time group: "The main aim of the Boot Time group is a bit flamboyant: to boot in 5 seconds from GRUB screen until GDM loads. At the moment this seems to be more of a motivation than a real aim. Also, there is not much code available yet. The team is focusing on discussion and data collection. You can find scripts for better bootchart diagnostics for example. The idea is to have a system where you don't have to reboot but can restart your init system."

Many distributions have been trying to reduce their boot times by replacing the traditional INIT system with a faster alternative, but even the best efforts have not been able to reduce the boot time to less than around 30 seconds. Will the openSUSE Boot Time group achieve the seemingly impossible and boot an operating system in just a few seconds?

Source: Distrowatch Weekly

[kalpik]

Yeah.. saw that.. But they also mention its kinda far fetched

[eddie]

Try try till you succeed

Also, I don't really feel it is far fetched. I have used einit on Gentoo and to tell you honestly, it boots in less than 7-8 seconds!!! When your system passes out of the initial boot phase and your init takes over...you wouldn't even know what hit you. The boot process would be there one moment and then gone the next one.

einit is still in initial stages of development but once Gentoo's baselayout 2 hits testing stage...we will see more gentoo users migrating to it and hence faster development.

[sachin_kothari]

even debian boots really fast.