From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Mar 5 20:32:11 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 806711065671 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 2008 20:32:11 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from feenberg@nber.org) Received: from mail2.nber.org (mail2.nber.org [66.251.72.79]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 338E08FC38 for ; Wed, 5 Mar 2008 20:32:10 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from feenberg@nber.org) Received: from nber5.nber.org (nber5.nber.org [66.251.72.75]) by mail2.nber.org (8.14.1/8.13.8) with ESMTP id m25K6d1T017351; Wed, 5 Mar 2008 15:06:40 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from feenberg@nber.org) Received: from nber5.nber.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by nber5.nber.org (8.13.8+Sun/8.13.8) with ESMTP id m25K6dFv020764; Wed, 5 Mar 2008 15:06:39 -0500 (EST) Received: from localhost (feenberg@localhost) by nber5.nber.org (8.13.8+Sun/8.13.8/Submit) with ESMTP id m25K6ds8020761; Wed, 5 Mar 2008 15:06:39 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: nber5.nber.org: feenberg owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 15:06:39 -0500 (EST) From: Daniel Feenberg To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Anti-Virus: Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Sendmail with Milter API 5.6.20, bases: 20080305 #550045, check: 20080305 clean Subject: faster booting X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:32:11 -0000 We have several network services hosted on a FreeBSD system, and want it to come up quickly, so that these services (dhcp, nameservice, nis, tftp etc) are available when systems are restarting after a prolonged power failure. That is, several times a year we have multi-hour power failures (generally starting at midnight because that is utility maintainance time) and our UPSs run out of power. That is OK, but we would like the systems to come up when the power returns, without going to the server room and restarting systems in a prescribed order. In most cases the clients hang because essential services are not available, and in most cases the clients do not proceed to boot later when the service does become available. So, is there advice anywhere about speeding up the boot process? It appears that most of the 1 minute 45 seconds to boot our system is wait time for checking the existence of non-existant hardware and would not be appreciable reduced with a faster CPU or disk. Are there kernel options that we could use to avoid this checking? Would recompiling the kernel in some specialized way help? Would pico-bsd be faster? About the only thing I can find is to reduce the 10 second boot screen delay - but we need to cut more than 30 seconds. The server is statically configured but the clients obtain network configuration from dhcp and pxeboot with nfs mounted root directories. Clients are FreeBSD and Linux, and we are not eager to give up pxeboot as it has greatly simplified maintainance. Any suggestions, pointers much appreciated. Daniel Feenberg NBER