TIL You can use `systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg` to plot the service startup time to find bottlenecks
Apparently the reason my computer has been taking 2 minutes to boot was a faulty network mount
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Apparently the reason my computer has been taking 2 minutes to boot was a faulty network mount
I'm pretty sure the main system startup bottleneck is me typing the disk encryption passphrase.
Combine that with the 20-30 seconds my system takes to do bios memory training on the DDR5 ram and we’re practically back to the “go make some coffee while the system boots up” days 🤦
If only Coreboot supported more devices…
Glad I haven't built a modern chipset PC yet, didn't realize it was this bad.
As another DDR5 user, it’s not always this bad - there’s a bios setting that makes it remember the previous configuration and skips this step, but sometimes it still needs to do it, and then it can take a minute or two
Those where the good days. You always had fresh coffee when your computer was ready for work.
I can relate to this hahaha
I wish to replace it with a yubikey, but I don't even know if it's supported.
It is supported by systemd to use FIDO2 + pin to decrypt luks partitions with many security keys, including Yubikeys. I use it every day on my laptop.
It is, I have it set up on my laptop. It's a bit finicky in how it works and it's not easy to setup, but it is possible.
Does it work by emulating the keyboard and typing in the password? Or by the encrypted protocol that works using the on device secret?
Both should be possible. I am using the psuedo 2FA method. First I type the PIN and after that I confirm with YubiKey.
You can't even use a fucking fingerprint scanner while being in the system, that package is borked for months and nobody seem to care to solve it.
I think using Yubikey at boot time is quite out of reach
My system bottleneck is the damn Bios Post
Fucking true. Does anyone know why this is so slow?
You can use
systemd-analyze blameif you want raw numbers:Good way to see if your systemd also waits 2 minutes for a network connection which already exists but it can't see it because systemd doesn't do the networking (lxc containers on proxmox in my case) lol.
Also see systemd-analyze.
Also
systemd-analyze critical-chainAny way to speed this up? On my system in every boot it waits for network for 30s.
In my case i masked the service because like i said, inside the lxc container there is no networking to do, it's done on the host (proxmox). Note that disabling the service in my case was not enough since it could be invoked by other services, and then you would have to wait again.
See this for further info and maybe arguments why you shouldn't do it.
My main offender is something called updatedb.service, whatever that is.
Systemd has so many neat and useful tools that they never tell anyone about :(
Just like Ceph :(
… systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg
Honestly I laughed when it just spit an SVG in text at me. I was wholly expecting a GUI to appear.
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
No, SVG are text files, it's XML. You can write an SVG file representing a square using only a text editor relatively easily.
No, not really. Most image formats produce completely unreadable jumbo only meant to be parsed with clever maths.
Is there a way to do this for shutdown? It'd be great to debug shutdown hangs.
No, there currently isn’t
Source
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.
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.
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.
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.
The good ol' Gnome on Wayland on SystemD on GNU on Linux trick
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
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 think you a word in your title.
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.
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?
Damn I really needed systemd analyzer to debug stuff! Thanks!
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!
How many times a day you guys reboot? 236? Mine takes like 17 seconds... Every week or so...
Laptop gang
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.
Anyone know about a Windows equivalent for my work laptop?
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.
Sysinternals Process Monitor can do boot logging.