Apparently the reason my computer has been taking 2 minutes to boot was a faulty network mount
TIL: Systemd is great and despite its usefulness, it is often overlooked due to controversy and the current state of things when it comes to software development. https://tadeubento.com/2023/systemd-hidden-gems-for-a-better-linux/
Thanks for the article, I’ve already spotted a few utilities that can come in useful. I’ve heard a lot of criticism about systemd too, but never really actively used it myself until a few weeks ago. I actually quite like it from what I’ve seen so far.
How do you read this?
The top/1st line is the first service and it cascaded down as each subsequent service starts. Left to right is time elapsed. Bright red line is time to start that service. Shorter is better.
Does that help?
Save output as whatever.html and open in browser.
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Damn I really needed systemd analyzer to debug stuff! Thanks!
Anyone know about a Windows equivalent for my work laptop?
Sysinternals Process Monitor can do boot logging.
You can use the Windows Performance Recorder to capture the boot time and then use Windows Performance Analyzer to view the results. It should also be able to show the results as a timeline.
It tells me that my system boots in 7 seconds. That’s pretty cool, considering that it’s installed on a plain old sata SSD.
POST, however…
I wrote a long-ish comment in another thread explaining why lots of people don’t like systemd.
Stuff like this is why people do like systemd.
The massive, un unixy and complex tools allow for very powerful and somewhat knowledge agnostic approaches to all sorts of problems.
One of the nicest things about systemds toolset is that it allows a person who relies on finding the problem and googling it to resolve thing much faster than their alternative, learn what’s going on and figure it out.
I don’t mean that as a pejorative, plenty of computer work is maintenance as opposed to engineering and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Dang had no idea this was a thing, but this looks very useful! I’ve been meaning to troubleshoot slow startup on one of my servers.
Aha! Reminds me of the good old days when I tried to minimize boot up time on my puny Ivy Bridge i5 laptop. Those days were fun!
My bottleneck at boot is my damn Bios… I am so hyped about flashing Heads on my Thinkpad T430.
Even the old legacy Lenovo bioses where very fast at startup. The UEFI (with extremely nice secure-boot settings too) of an AMD Acer starts up in like 2 seconds. My old intel Thinkpad T430 needs like 4 seconds.
And then my Lenovo T495 bullshit UEFI comes. No secure boot configuration at all, I have no idea how to boot from USB sticks, and this thing needs nearly 10 seconds to boot! Linux compared, a full Desktop OS, needs 3 seconds to show SDDM (after the LUKS dialog)
I adore my T530. I could kill a moose with it if it ever stops working. Literally dug it out of a dumpster and saw the i7 sticker and almost shit myself. Honestly I’ve had it for years and never even looked at the bios cuz with an SSD even with encryption enabled on the disk it booted in 30 sec.
Until I built my latest rig I was doing ai image generation on it with 8gigs of ram.
If you have a T530, there is coreboot for it! Dont know if 1vyra.in works, check it.
Its not the question, if it works, but how it works! Its trustworthy and not extremely outdated proprietary garbage. Actually extremely important to update
Thanks friend!
You can even install Heads! This requires Hardware flashing though, not soo easy like 1vyrain but actually secure.
Heads
Dang, my T410 is just too old.
how does it run modern OSses?
Its crazy how expensive T430 etc still are. People know how great they are
I’m shocked how smoothly it runs Gnome on Debian 12. KDE on NixOS was okay but had some noticeable slowdown. Here I was thinking it would be relegated to being an Arch CLI terminal.
this is interesting! if i had a two minute boot time, I’d look for ways to figure out what’s going on.
i remember init messages used to be printed to the console, but nowadays all i get is Manjaro branding. anyone know how to get my console messages back from systemd?
If you hit a key when the Manjaro logo is up (or maybe just ESC) it will go away and you’ll get your messages back. Hit it again and you’ll get the logo back. The splash screen is due to a program called Plymouth if you want to remove it permanently
Is there a way to do this for shutdown? It’d be great to debug shutdown hangs.
No, there currently isn’t
And it’s not as easy to add actually. Note that systemd only keeps units loaded as long as they are referenced by something else that is loaded, are running, have failed, or have a job queued. That means if a service is terminated at shutdown there’s a very good chance it is GC’ed away pretty quickly. Now, while systemd keeps timestamping info around for services that tell us how long a service was running, took to start or took to shut down all that info is lost the instant the unit is GC’ed away…
How many times a day you guys reboot? 236? Mine takes like 17 seconds… Every week or so…
11s on my laptop which i boot once a day, but it is useful for diagnostics. I had something hanging once during boot and it’s pinpointed it right away.
Laptop gang
the only “bottleneck” i currently have is plymouth-quit-wait.service, which takes 3.9 seconds. i can live with that
I know you put bottleneck is quotes but just to explain… apparently this service is simply the splash screen that waits on a ready environment. It doesn’t actually delay anything.
abrtd.service, 34 seconds…
thanks fedora, very cool
Systemd can generate SVGs? Damn thats “bloat” but also unexpectedly fancy
SVGs are just fancy text files after all
If you go far enough, everything is.
But SVGs are one of the few image types that can be human readable and editable
If you go far enough, everything is.
No, SVG are text files, it’s XML. You can write an SVG file representing a square using only a text editor relatively easily.
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