Improving Fedora boot up time

2008 Nov 11 at 14:35 » Tagged as :virtualization, bootstrap, python,

Looking at the boot up time of my Fedora 9 Desktop, I found it to be a rather disappointing 59 seconds. I managed to reduce that somewhat by optimizing the firewall startup script and killing off a few services that I don't like don't want.

Optimizing boot up time is a tedious process and I hate to reboot my machine anyway. So I thought, i would try it with Qemu. After creating a Qemu guest (I chose Fedora 9 - i386 for this because I want to be able to run applets on it) I installed bootchart. Boot chart is a nice piece of software that logs the boot up process and from that log file you can create  Gannt chart.

The Qemu guest operating system resides on my File server. That machine has an E2180 processor at 2.0 GHz. The E2180 doesn't have the vmx flag set, so not surprisingly boot up time was slow. Very slow in fact a whopping 4:43 !