probonopd
commented
2 years ago How is a comparison in boot speed (in seconds to full desktop) between 0.6.0 and helloSystem new-style ISOs?
- helloSystem 0.6.0 around 20 min
- helloSystem new-style ISOs around 13 min
- But it is still slow compared to other live systems. They take about 5-6 min (e.g., Calculate Linux, Manjaro Linux)
Different areas on a CD/DVD can be read at different speeds. Some Linux Live systems are optimized for this, and data is arranged so that as few seeks as possible are needed. I don't think this is possible using ufs + uzip, but maybe I am wrong.
With our new-style ISOs, we achieve much higher boot speed by not copying the whole filesystem to RAM before booting.
However, on physical DVD drives this may have the disadvantage that the DVD drive needs to do a lot of non-sequential reads ("seeking"), which they are notoriously bad at.
Hence, we could possibly improve the speed when the ISO is running from a physical DVD drive.
If the computer has at least 3 GB and we are booted from an actual DVD drive, then copy to RAM before booting, unless the user says otherwise. Something like that.
(But then we would be back to reroot. And it would complicate the whole logic because we now would have to care for two different boot paths, which might increase the maintenance and testing effort down the line. So the question is: is it really worth the effort)
cc @larshenrikoern @jsm222