Fedora Core Help

Boot Fedora Linux Faster: How I Modified Fedora To Boot In Under 25 Seconds

Everyone wants a quick boot time, from the beginner user to the advanced user, this is a issue that bothers us all. As Linux has advanced it has increasingly become slower to boot. I have tested on my machine 4 Linux distributions: Linspire, Fedora 3 & 4, Suse 9.2 & 9.3, and Debian. And on average between all these distributions Linux needs around a minute to 1 and half minutes to go from boot loader to graphical login screen. So I decided to look into reducing the time it takes to boot my current setup, which is Fedora 4. In doing so I was able to reduce the boot time of my Fedora 4 installation to less than 25 seconds (just above 24 seconds on average). Below I have documented what I did, and what you can use to potentially reduce your boot up time for Linux.

Of course we will be dealing with advanced Linux know how, so this is not for beginners. Also results may vary on your end since there are a lot of factors involved.

UNOFFICIAL Fedora Core 4.1 (i386 only for now)

I'm sorry for the currently very basic/ugly site this is, it'll hopefully get facelift soon.

General Info:
Basically this is Fedora Core 4 but with all the official update rpms instead of the original ones.
We did not recompile them ourself.
The updates are as of 14'th September 2005.
The kernel used during install is "2.6.12-1.1447" and could solve some installation problems seen with FC4.

This server runs FC4.1, and is the only one we have tested the install with so far.
Note that there most probably are bugs in here that do not appear with the original official FC4 images.
We recommend that you only consider downloading this for testing if you are an experienced user.

We made these images for our own usage, but realised others could benefit from them aswell.
We might make new versions later and we might make images for other architectures later, only time will tell.
If feedback both from users and the fedora community is generally positive then the better the chance for updates.

We have observed these _POSSIBLE_ bugs so far:
-Some error at first boot complaining about /etc/fstab beeing incorrect and that it is ignoring the rest
Don't know the real effect of this, everything except swap seems to work.
-Swap partition was not active at boot (Did I forget to set it up in anaconda? I think not.. Related to the fstab problem? Maybe..)
Workaround: Insert the following line into /etc/fstab (replace /dev/md3 with your actual swap partition)


/dev/md3 swap swap defaults 0 0
-Default gateway was not set (Maybe I entered the wrong address and it just ignored it?)
Workaround: run 'setup' after boot, and check that the settings are correct

For more information about Fedora visit them: http://fedora.redhat.com
Please do not bother the fedora developers with bugs occuring in the unofficial FC4.1 unless they also occur under official FC4.