Breaking my archlinux laptops with e4rat

It's Sunday, I'm bored, I've posted a few things already and now it's time to pointlessly play with my archlinux laptops. So, let's begin with trying to make my laptop pointlessly boot faster, it's something that I rarely bother to do on the servers that I run, but on a laptop it might be worth the hassle. Anyway the following only works on Linux and systems with an ext4 root filesystem. So start by installing e4rat

packer -S e4rat

This will install a few small applications, once it is installed I profiled my boot sequence by doing what was suggested on the e4rat homepage. This is done by going into the boot menu and changing the kernel line to include an init script to the one supplied by e4rat for example I added this to grub kernel line

init=/sbin/e4rat-collect

Then boot up as normal, by default e4rat will record the disk activity for 120seconds if this is not long enough it can be extended by editing /etc/e4rat.conf. If it is too long you can just kill the process. Now you need to run the reallocator,

sudo init 1
e4rat-realloc /var/lib/e4rat/startup.log

Then substitute init=/sbin/e4rat-collect with init=/sbin/e4rat-preload. The above steps would probably need to be re-run everytime when you upgrade a package that is related to the boot process or add more things to the boot process.

I didn't notice any appreciable improvment, probably because my machines are pretty minimal to begin with, and I don't bother booting into X automatically. It's probably more worthwhile if I booted into X directly and ran a more heavyweight window manager. This caused me to bother to setup xdm on both archlinux laptops and create a bunch of boot options to run e4rat. To be honest my machines had probably spent most of its time trying to connect to the network on boot.

So what was the point of the above? I guess not much other than the fact I was bored and it looked interesting at the time.

Memory debuggers and garbage collectors for C/C++
Posted Sat 16 Jul 2011 12:26:33 PM BST