On Sat, 2005-03-05 at 11:41 +0530, Parameshwara Bhat wrote: > On my home computer and office computer, I have logged the time taken upto > logging in, it turns out that Ms windows(XP) is faster than Linux. On both > computers, dma is turned on.On my home computer, I have SUSE, Fedora and > Knoppix (debian) installed and on office computer, only Fedora. I have > measured with all the distros and while knoppix is faster of the distros, > still it doesn't measure upto Windows in speed. Both fedora and SUSE take > about one and a times longer time, evrything else remaining same. > > Any comments ? Or am I missing something ? > Also Windows 2000 & Windows XP from my experience give the "press ctrl- alt-del to logon" about 20-30 seconds before all the services are loaded and you can actually logon. Microsoft considers offering the ability to logon before you actually can a "user experience enhancement" giving the appearance of quicker startup. I would agree though that XP generally boots faster than Linux because XP from what I remember that it starts services it can in parallel where it can. Currently Fedora and other Linux distros start services sequentially and the last service to start is the display manager that gives the logon prompt. As other replies have mentioned, there is some work being done by various groups to speed up the boot process and there are other mitigating circumstances. 1. Little need to reboot just to things "acting odd" 2. Updates and Patches generally don't require a system reboot. 3. Linux for the most part has been a server OS and basically you only reboot servers on the weekend or other scheduled down-time and if it boots up in 30 seconds or 5 minutes does not really matter. On my dell servers at work the BIOS takes longer to boot than Linux does. One thing that can speed up the boot process by several seconds on Red Hat based distros is disabling kudzu (new hardware detection service) you can do this by "chkconfig kudzu off" as root. The downside to this is if you do add new hardware it won't automatically be installed, this can be gotten around by "service kudzu start" as root. Regards, Paul Berger
