Is it possible to make Fedora load faster?

[Dan Williams]

On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:
> Yes there was a lot of talk about getting down boot time - but what did
> come of it? It isn't listed as major goals for fc4 anymore - so will fc4
> boot faster than fc3 did, or did this effort run out in the sand?

At least in Red Hat (not sure what Fedora community people have been doing on 
this front) some of the guys have been working on killing rhgb.  The idea here 
is to start gdm as early as possible and let other services continue to start 
while gdm is running and/or the user is logging in.  That also involves 
readahead optimization to make sure stuff that needs to get loaded gets loaded 
as early as possible.

If these things make it to FC4, they will not be default but will be easily 
enabled with a kernel boot parameter.

Other interesting ideas are disabling unecessary system services that desktop 
users certainly do not need, as a group, like gpm.  Furthermore, killing dumb 
cron jobs that run every day like 'updatedb' and 'makewhatis' would help make 
the desktop experience a hell of a lot better (geez, run them every 3 days and 
only when the machine has been idle for 5 minutes or something, and re-nice them 
really really really low so they don't screw over the user).

Dan