Very fast booting Arch Linux VM (On Gentoo) - 8.5 seconds to GNOME 3 Fallback and Opera 11

So... I was challenged to make a very fast booting system. The idea was to beat a friend who managed to make an operating system boot in 14 seconds on dedicated hardware.

This was the result...

The system I was using had considerable strain, as it was already running 4 other VMs, many applications, and I was recording my desktop. Yet I still managed to get ti to boot in less than 10 seconds. (It was close to 8.5)

Needless to say, I won this challenge. :^

I used VMWare workstation 7, and Opera 11.50.

This video was recorded with recordmydesktop, and converted with FFMpeg.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Linux
• VMware
• Arch Linux
• Gentoo
• Fast
• Boot
• Fast boot
• recordmydesktop
• Angelfire7590
• Dopefish7590
• GIR7590
• GNU
• VMware Workstation
• speed
• competition
• GNOME
• GNOME 2
• GNOME 3
• compiz
• Opera
• Opera 11.50
• Opera 11
• GNOME 3 Fallback
• Finneon
• Cherrim
• Sableye
• Celebi
• Charmander
• Chikorita
• Pemyu

[thebigguyconnor]

what desktop environment is that?? howd you make your arch boot so fast? usually mine gets slow on triggering uevents.

Just any info would be handy!

[Angelfire7590]

@thebigguyconnor It's Gnome 3 Fallback mode... And I made it boot fast by editing rc.conf to start DBus first, and them start GDM daemoned... And then proceed to load other non-essential services in the background.

And uevents is slow..? What's hanging in your system boot? Check the output of "dmesg | less" for a large gap in time, and that is probably your issue. (Most likely a kernel module)

[aleclitvinov]

Did you try "ro quiet fastboot" kernel options? They let me win another second. Actually my netbook boots slightly faster due to monolithic kernel, SSD, lzo-compressed btrfs for / and /usr partitions and lots of #'s in rc.sysinit. I don't use Gnome or Opera - I'm quite satisfied with Compiz + stripped LXDE + Midori, they make a feature-rich set that's lighter on resources. But how did you make Opera that fast? I can compile it without Qt in Gentoo, but it's Arch. Is that binary package or ABS?

[Angelfire7590]

@aleclitvinov Nope... I ended up Googling fastboot and noticed "Woah, that is actually a thing!"...

[RebellDigital]

LOL !!