Booting over network - Use ipxe and forget etherboot/gpxe

I was playing around with diskless options and decided to see if I could boot Puppy Linux over the network. As usual, it was easy to find a recipe on the net. I got the gpxe boot linux kernel image for forcedeth driver.

The surprise was the terrible performance I got on a 100mbps network. I did not wait for it to finish booting! On a 1GB network, the performance was 'merely' bad. I did not expect tftp to be so bad!

Searching the net, I realized that gpxe allows html as the protocol instead. There was no change if I used pxelinux.0 and it was even worse if I used gpxelinux.0! I tried pxelinux.0 and gpxelinux.0 from version 5.01 of Syslinux with no improvement. However, the performance was better on my lenovo netbook which needed the r8169 driver. The performance using html protocol was still not any better.

The search for an answer led to the ipxe project. Mercifully, the ipxe.krn from the iso file worked for both the cards. Now, the performance over html was significantly better. It took half the time to boot Puppy Linux using html protocol.

Overcoming Slow Boot of Fedora 16 after LiveCD installation

I had failed to upgrade Lenovo S10-3 netbook to Fedora 16 using yum as I have been doing for several years and successfully did on my desktop. The system became unusable under Fedora; so, I could not diagnose the cause.

I installed KDE livecd spin on the netbook. The boot time seemed to be ages in comparison to Fedora 15 and, especially, Arch Linux which I normally use on this netbook.

Searching the net for plausible reasons led to using "systemd-analyze blame". The top of the list was "udev-settle.service", which really is not the issue.

Anyway, I noticed that there were livesys.service and livesys-late.service which are not needed once the livecd is installed. The time shown for these by "systemd-analyze blame" was 290ms and 44msec respectively. Hardly something to worry about. However, disabling the livesys and livesys-late services resulted in the userspace boot time decreasing from 87 sec to 36 sec! The overall decrease was 97 sec to 44  sec :)

Now, "systemd-analyze blame" gave a little more useful details. The top entry was iscsi.service. Wikipedia entry indicated that this was not something I was likely to use. Disabling iscsi and iscsid services reduced the userspace boot time to 27 sec and overall time to 37 sec.

Removing mdmonitor-takeover and lvm2-monitor services did not make any significant difference.

Disabling httpd and and mysqld, which I normally do not need on the netbook, saved another 5 sec and the boot time now is 32 sec of which 22 is the userspace time.

Next step is to use bootchart to see if I can understand where the time goes before the system becomes usable.

Fedora 15 takes too long to boot: traced to Systemd?

I filed a bug report - "System takes over 2 additional minutes to boot after updating to kernel 2.6.38.8-35".

This was in July. The problem was erratic. If I tried to trace it, it seemed to disappear. It persisted even after upgrading to 2.6.40. In fact, it seemed to be more consistent. Removing VirtualBox 'solved' the problem but not for long.

Then finally an entry in the system log messages helped!

Oct 25 15:22:28 amd avahi-daemon[1792]: Registering new address record for fe80::217:31ff:fe93:e65a on eth0.*.
Oct 25 15:27:26 amd systemd[1]: network.service operation timed out.  Terminating.

Fortunately, I had not rebooted the system and let it try to boot for over 5 minutes.


It led to the realisation that I had been running network service even though it was not needed any more when using NetworkManager.

Now for the last three days, the system has been booting fine after I disabled the network service.

I will wait a few more days before filing a bug report against systemd - just to be sure.

NetworkManager makes a difference

I finally managed to get NetworkManager to work for a fixed ip as well. It was really simple. Both system-config-network and nm-applet create the appropriate files.

Fedora includes a plugin - ifcfg-rh. This integrates the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts with the NetworkManager settings. The line needed in ifcfg-ethX is:
NM_CONTROLLED=yes

Plugging/unplugging the cable enables/disables the interface.

The use of NetworkManager reduced the boot time by about 20 sec to 1 minute.

Unfortunately, too late for me to check out the same changes on Fedora 10