[mythtv-users] Can a diskless frontend WOL the backend?

[Paul Wheeler]

On 6/4/06, Paul Bender <pebender at san.rr.com> wrote:
> Phill Edwards wrote:
>
> > I always thought this looked a really interesting approach to
> > improving boot times -
> > http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-boot.html. I
> > haven't got around to trying it yet so can't vouch for it.
> >
> > There's also some inrteresting info at
> > http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/13/173227&tid=129
> >
> > NB - all of tehse approaches look like pretty serious changes - caveat
> > emptor etc. Also, I imagine one of the drawbacks is that unless
> > they're part of a distro you're going to have to re-apply all the good
> > work every time you upgrade the distro.
> >
> > If you do have any success please share!
>
> I contribute to a custom MythTV frontend Linux distribution called
> MiniMyth <http://linpvr.org>. As part of this, I implemented some of
> these parallel booting techniques in order to see whether or not it
> reduce the boot time. For this specific application, I found that it had
> little impact on boot time so I did not include them.
>
> I could see how it might have significant impact on the boot time for a
> server that starts numerous services. However, a dedicated MythTV
> frontend Linux distribution starts very few services.
>
> For MiniMyth booting from a USB key on an ASUS A8N-VM CSM motherboard,
> the entire boot time is 40s. However, the BOIS takes 5s, loading the
> kernel and image takes 10s, detecting and mounting the USB drive takes
> 5s, and starting X and mythfrontend takes 5s. That leaves less than 15s
> of boot time that might be run in parallel. Therefore, there is very
> little time to be saved by making these things run in parallel.
>
> For MiniMyth booting over the network, it takes somewhat longer (55s for
> the ASUS A8N-VM CSM motherboard) and running things in parallel saved
> slightly more time. However, the time saved was still not a very
> significant portion of the boot time.

Accepting what Paul has said above initng looks like another
interesting way to boot up quicker. I find that the main slow point it
in mounting my recordings hard drive (using reiserfs). Good luck and
if you get any significant speed ups let us know.

Paul


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