BootSpeed

Summary

Iteratively investigate the boot process for preinstalled images on ARM. Find slow points or blockers. Optimise where feasible.

Release Note

Ubuntu 11.10 is now able to boot in ${TIME} on ${HARDWARE}!!!

Rationale

A full investigation to improve boot speed has been performed for i386, targeting the Dell Mini 9. This led to significant improvements in speed for many people, with many sorts of hardware. Compared to other software solutions, Ubuntu boots relatively slowly on ARM hardware: there may be architecture-specific reasons for this, which ought be investigated and fixed. Since the i386 investigations (Lucid) there was no Ubuntu-wide effort to improve on the boot speed or at least not regress, and in some cases current images boot slower than they used to.

User stories

Assumptions

Design

Implementation

Bootchart will be used to measure the boot process on a Panda board (OMAP4) Biggest offenders will be investigated. Packages not needed or very unlikely to be useful for ARM are going to be removed from the image if they affect boot speed. X/GDM/Unity-2D specific fast login possibility will be investigated.

UI Changes

Code Changes

Migration

Test/Demo Plan

It's important that we are able to test new features, and demonstrate them to users. Use this section to describe a short plan that anybody can follow that demonstrates the feature is working. This can then be used during testing, and to show off after release. Please add an entry to http://testcases.qa.ubuntu.com/Coverage/NewFeatures for tracking test coverage.

This need not be added or completed until the specification is nearing beta.

Unresolved issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec

ARM/Specs/BootSpeed (last edited 2011-05-26 07:37:37 by 188-24-95-166)