Launch and boot times of AWS FreeBSD AMI

[Colin Percival]

On 09/01/17 14:24, Rafal Lukawiecki wrote:
> I wonder if there is any possibility to shorten the launch and reboot times
> of the FreeBSD AMI. I understand that it is necessary to have the first
> post-install and update reboot, after the initial launch, but it seems to
> take a longish time compared to Amazon Linux. Without any solid
> measurements, it seems, from the “VGA” console, that it does pause a bit
> after printing the SSH fingerprint and starting cron, sendmail, configuring
> vt, scheduling a background fsck in 60 secs, and printing these odd
> messages:

Yes, it is annoyingly slow.  Part of this is the initial freebsd-update
pulling down updates, but there are definitely things which should be faster.

> [: =: unexpected operator
> [: =: unexpected operator
> mount: /dev/gpt/rootfs: Device busy
> [: =: unexpected operator

I've been meaning to track down where these are coming from.  Setting
rc_debug=YES in /etc/rc.conf might help...

> I wonder if it could be optimised, somehow. It would be nice to shave a
> minute or more from the waits, if possible. I am also curious what those
> errors are.

One issue I *have* tracked down is that on large systems we spend a crazy
amount of time initializing VM -- around 45 seconds on a x1.32xlarge.  I
tested a patch from markj last week but I don't think it has gone into the
tree yet.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid