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by ValdikSS·1y ago·view on hn ↗

By the way, you can tune boot times further. My print server board boots in 8 seconds to Debian 12 (bootloader + kernel + userspace).

    1. Make sure the bootloader (u-boot) loads the kernel as fast as possible.
        - Disable automatic Ethernet/USB/other subsystems initialization (you can keep them enabled, just don't activate unless requested in the shell manually by the user)
        - Tune `distro_bootcmd` command
        - Make sure that MicroSD/eMMC/SSD works full-speed (with proper clocks and speed protocol)
    2. Use fast decompression algorithm for the kernel and initramfs
        - It's either zstd or gzip
    3. Collect boot file access data and sort the files on the filesystem
        - The benefit in near-linear access & read-ahead

I'm pretty sure that the current 20 seconds could be shrunk down to 14 or so.

Pinebook Pro boots in about 10s to DE and that's RK3399. Pretty sure RK3588 can boot even faster, considering the advantage of PCIe/nvme storage that can run at > 3GiB/s. Software load times stop being a constraint at those speeds.

My Orange Pi 5 Plus boots to sway+firefox already open in about 15s and a lot of it is waiting for net being online.

    7.125s systemd-networkd-wait-online.service