FreeBSD Boot Times

Hans Petter Selasky hselasky at c2i.net
Tue Jun 12 07:27:08 UTC 2012


On Tuesday 12 June 2012 08:23:33 Andriy Gapon wrote:
> on 12/06/2012 01:21 Brandon Falk said the following:
> > Greetings,
> > 
> > I was just wondering what it is that FreeBSD does that makes it take so
> > long to boot. Booting into Ubuntu minimal or my own custom Linux distro,
> > literally takes 0.5-2 seconds to boot up to shell, where FreeBSD takes
> > about 10-20 seconds. I'm not sure if anything could be parallelized in
> > the boot process, but Linux somehow manages to do it. The Ubuntu install
> > I do pretty much consists of a shell and developers tools, but it still
> > has a generic kernel. There must be some sort of polling done in the
> > FreeBSD boot process that could be parallelized or eliminated.
> > 
> > Anyone have any suggestions?
> 
> Do you have a breakdown of the boot time between pre-loader, loader, kernel
> and rc stages?
> 
> > Note: This isn't really an issue, moreso a curiosity.
> 
> Ditto. :-)

BTW: Booting over USB is slow because many small chuncks of data is read 
instead of a few big chunks when loading the kernel and modules at the loader 
time.

--HPS


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