[mythtv-users] Quick boots (was OT: suspend to disc....)

[Jules Bean]

Jules Gosnell wrote:
> Next time i boot the machine, I will make a note of the messages - i 
> will recognise the ones that it usually hangs on because they are 
> indelibly etched onto my brain :-) I did, of course try re-rebooting and 
> re-re-re...booting - all without success.... The kernel comes up OK, 
> then it begins ticking things off its list and hangs as it does on of 
> these things - I'll get back to you - probably tonight.

Well, no promises, but we'll try to work it out. Certainly there should 
be a less radical solution to whatever it is than reinstalling from 
scratch. In, erm, about 10 years of linux use I haven't had to reinstall 
a single box... my main debian box was originally installed around 7 
years ago, since then every single hardware component has been replaced 
at least once and most of them twice (that's chips, CPUs, hard disks, 
cases, everything), and all without reinstalling. :-)


> I've already disabled a number of services, simply to save memory and 
> cpu, but I'm sure that this has had a a favourable impact on boot time 
> as well. Ultimately though, I think a resume-from-disc has to be faster 
> than the equivalent cold-start from disc, doesn't it ? If the service 
> set is the same....

I don't know. I was wondering the same thing, but I simply don't know 
without doing some pretty careful tests.

In principle, resume-from-disk probably involves reading a whole memory 
image from disk. Say 512M, that's going to take quite a while even with 
a fast modern disk.  Start-from-disk, however, only has to read in the 
kernel (2M, roughly) initrd (I'm not sure, a couple of M also), whatever 
services it wants to start, and then actually start them.

It sounds like resume-from-disk would be quicker, but I suspect testing 
is needed. Embedded harware manufacturers can make linux boot in < 500ms :-)

Jules