FreeBSD kernel init slower than linux

[Damien Fleuriot]

On 4 Mar 2011, at 23:10, David Demelier <demelier.david at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I know this is a awful subject, but I recently tried a Gentoo on my laptop and I was surprised to see Linux booting about 2-3 times faster than FreeBSD.
> 
> I don't talk about the init/rc script but only kernel initialisation. For linux kernel it's around 5-6 seconds vs 15-18 seconds for FreeBSD.
> 
> Why FreeBSD is so slower than Linux to boot the kernel?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- 
> David Demelier
> ______________________________


I'll drift a bit off topic here, just slightly.


To be honest, I for one would muuuuuch rather have a bsd kernel that takes a bit more time to boot, than a Linux one.

Have you seen the rate at which debian publishes kernel updates ?

We reboot some servers every week here, to apply this or that new kernel.

Bsd takes longer, but over the course of a month we might reboot them once vs thrice for Linux.

Overall, and discounting all the upgrading hassle, who boots faster now ?
1x freebsd or 3x Linux ? ;)

To accelerate boot time you may also recompile a custom kernel and remove support for all the stuff you don't need, like all these outdated NIC drivers, wifi, scsi if you run sata...

I run kernels with support for just one sata raid controller, 3 NIC drivers, remove support for all the USB stuff except the keyboard in case we need local console access, remove UFS ACL support (never used it, not sure I ever will).
Hell I even remove support for the parallel port...


Dramatically speeds up the boot process.