7 ms·

I wish FreeBSD booted faster. I recall it took nearly a minute from turning my machine on (with an SSD and a recent Intel i5 processor) before I was prompted fo

I wish FreeBSD booted faster. I recall it took nearly a minute from turning my machine on (with an SSD and a recent Intel i5 processor) before I was prompted for my login credentials. It's little things like that which make the system feel a bit dated, at least to someone like me who is an outsider to FreeBSD but has used Linux for a decade. I also wished FreeBSD needed less configuration to use as a desktop (see https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/freebsd-on-a-laptop/ https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/freebsd-on-a-laptop/ for what I mean). Also, does Zoom work on FreeBSD?

andoriyu 6y ago
> Also, does Zoom work on FreeBSD? I used Zoom on FreeBSD. By use I mean I was able to be in a meeting, see screen share, share my screen, but I had to dial in for audio and never tried webcam.
mapgrep 6y ago
One key impetus for Linux moving to systemd was faster boot time, parallelizing init tasks. Is FreeBSD looking at moving beyond traditional rc script boot?
- toast0 6y ago
  There's no need to abandon rc scripts to get parallelism. It looks like there's some work in progress on this [1]. From what I can tell, the change to rcorder to generate parallel start info is there in 13.0, but the change in /etc/rc to request it and to use it is not. You would need to patch that in manually for now. [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/unitrunker/rcorder https://wiki.freebsd.org/unitrunker/rcorder
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- tal8d 6y ago
  As somebody who fled Linux to FreeBSD in order to avoid systemd, the prospect of that happening again makes me a little sick to my stomach. Running out of places to go that aren't controlled by people who are openly hostile to POSIX standards.
  - mapgrep 6y ago
    Wouldn’t have to be systemd, macOS has launchd for init, FreeBSD could come up with its own thing. This is a good talk I saw recently (by a FreeBSD contributor) on why these sorts of systems have become more common, and why they seem so sweeping in scope. https://youtu.be/o_AIw9bGogo https://youtu.be/o_AIw9bGogo (In fact systemd and launchd are so tailored to their respective operating systems that FreeBSD likely would have to do their own init replacement if they cared to.)
    - tal8d 6y ago
      > This is a good talk That is not a good talk unless you already advocate for abandoning standards, and celebrate Linux's growing power to dictate how the shrinking number of remaining OSes design things. You might easily miss it if you're already onboard with systemd, but in his point by point address of systemd's shortcomings - he repeatedly handwaves and redirects. Systemd is a mess, which is an amazing accomplishment considering the fact that it is supposed to be this great unifying/simplifying layer. So awful that the DoD held out for the longest time in formalizing any kind of baseline security audit procedures that address it. Compare that to something like Solaris SMF. I've never had a problem with the rc system that made me blame the underlying design, but if I did - systemd would be at the bottom of a very long list of my potential solutions, right under 'Set the machine on fire and pickup a copy of "Industrial Society and Its Future"'. I really like the guy running the OpenZFS project, but it is painfully obvious that it is only going to increasingly cater to Linux - and coincidentally a lot of the really annoying aspects of the project are a result of that. For example: that Rube Goldberg build system, with massive amounts of code duplication... that wouldn't be there if not for autotools and gnu export symbol games.
      - oblio 6y ago
        Sys V init was not a standard. Is it in POSIX? I can't find it.
        tal8d 6y ago
        One of these init systems is run by a guy that is openly hostile to POSIX, the other can be found on several different operating systems and has been around forever. hmmm...
- rleigh 6y ago
  That was one of the notional reasons, but I (and others) haven't noticed much of a speedup. If anything, it's slightly slower in my experience (though this obviously depends upon the specific configuration). It was also not unique in parallelising startup tasks. Even sysvinit can be configured to do that with insserv+startpar.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  I would question whether boot time is such a meaningful target. It's trivial to leave a system up days or weeks relying on hibernation or suspend instead. This seems especially true given that freebsd is even more likely than Linux to see use as a server instead of a desktop. Besides boot time on any init system with a fast ssd seems to be pretty damn quick. Saving 10 seconds every month will take a long time to pay off.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Not so much on servers, but boot time is important on desktop, where most users will power it in only during the day.
    - blackhaz 6y ago
      Desktops can sleep as well. Boot time is important for embedded computers, e.g. in-vehicle systems, but otherwise I don't see why would this be such an issue.
      - mapgrep 6y ago
        Other than desktops, laptops, embedded systems, phones, and tablets, who cares about boot time......... /s
  - znpy 6y ago
    I generally agree on relying on suspend/resume, but keep in mind that doing so will greatly reduce your laptop battery lifespan. It's a toll that I decided to accept, but most people aren't aware of that.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      Your drain over a reasonable period for example unplug your laptop and shove in into a bag and take it out 1-8 hours SHOULD be relatively small. For example this now admittedly dated review seems so suggest a drain of about 0.6% per hour. https://lifehacker.com/how-much-battery-life-does-sleep-mode-really-drain-5526542 https://lifehacker.com/how-much-battery-life-does-sleep-mode... However the internet is seemingly full of complaints that machines drain fast during sleep so your experience may not be unusual but it might pay to check if something is wrong or at least sub-optimal. For example GPU not actually turning off, usb device keeping it from sleeping, hardware or software waking up your machine.
toast0 6y ago
The default bootloader delay is 10 seconds; you can probably tune that to one or zero, with autoboot_delay="1" in /boot/loader.conf Otherwise, I'm not aware of any easy wins (unless you're running 10.1 or older, in which case set hw.memtest.tests="0" to disable the boot time memory test which is very time consuming if you have a lot of ram and doesn't seem to be very useful; it was disabled in 10.2 and later). If you can see what steps are particularly slow, some of them might be influenced to be a bit faster (eg, if it's waiting on usb scan to mount disks, you can make that time out sooner if it's not necessary on your system; you may be able to do background dhcp instead of synchronous dhcp, etc). But I think someone could spend some real time making it faster to the benefit of those who boot often. Edit: following in the footsteps of cperciva's work; especially the profiling setup.
cperciva 6y ago
Have you tried profiling the FreeBSD boot (https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/percival-profiling_the_freebsd_kernel_boot/ https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/percival-profiling_th...) to see where the time is going? I made some significant speedups a couple years ago, but I'm sure there's still room for further improvements, especially if you have hardware which I didn't test with.
dddddaviddddd 6y ago
> Also, does Zoom work on FreeBSD? Native client: no. The web client is useable though, and virtualization can work: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/freebsd-videoconferencing https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/freebsd-videoconferenci... As others have mentioned the comparatively slow boot is because (for simplicity's sake) the process isn't parallelized. You can install alternate init systems from ports if you want to speed this up.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
0mp 6y ago
I'm running FreeBSD on T480 and after I configured the audio backend in Firefox (one variable in about:config) and the webcamd driver (2 lines in rc.conf) I can do video calls just fine. Both Jitsi and Zoom work as expected.

andoriyu 6y ago

> Also, does Zoom work on FreeBSD? I used Zoom on FreeBSD. By use I mean I was able to be in a meeting, see screen share, share my screen, but I had to dial in for audio and never tried webcam.

mapgrep 6y ago

One key impetus for Linux moving to systemd was faster boot time, parallelizing init tasks. Is FreeBSD looking at moving beyond traditional rc script boot?

toast0 6y ago
There's no need to abandon rc scripts to get parallelism. It looks like there's some work in progress on this [1]. From what I can tell, the change to rcorder to generate parallel start info is there in 13.0, but the change in /etc/rc to request it and to use it is not. You would need to patch that in manually for now. [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/unitrunker/rcorder https://wiki.freebsd.org/unitrunker/rcorder
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tal8d 6y ago
As somebody who fled Linux to FreeBSD in order to avoid systemd, the prospect of that happening again makes me a little sick to my stomach. Running out of places to go that aren't controlled by people who are openly hostile to POSIX standards.
- mapgrep 6y ago
  Wouldn’t have to be systemd, macOS has launchd for init, FreeBSD could come up with its own thing. This is a good talk I saw recently (by a FreeBSD contributor) on why these sorts of systems have become more common, and why they seem so sweeping in scope. https://youtu.be/o_AIw9bGogo https://youtu.be/o_AIw9bGogo (In fact systemd and launchd are so tailored to their respective operating systems that FreeBSD likely would have to do their own init replacement if they cared to.)
  - tal8d 6y ago
    > This is a good talk That is not a good talk unless you already advocate for abandoning standards, and celebrate Linux's growing power to dictate how the shrinking number of remaining OSes design things. You might easily miss it if you're already onboard with systemd, but in his point by point address of systemd's shortcomings - he repeatedly handwaves and redirects. Systemd is a mess, which is an amazing accomplishment considering the fact that it is supposed to be this great unifying/simplifying layer. So awful that the DoD held out for the longest time in formalizing any kind of baseline security audit procedures that address it. Compare that to something like Solaris SMF. I've never had a problem with the rc system that made me blame the underlying design, but if I did - systemd would be at the bottom of a very long list of my potential solutions, right under 'Set the machine on fire and pickup a copy of "Industrial Society and Its Future"'. I really like the guy running the OpenZFS project, but it is painfully obvious that it is only going to increasingly cater to Linux - and coincidentally a lot of the really annoying aspects of the project are a result of that. For example: that Rube Goldberg build system, with massive amounts of code duplication... that wouldn't be there if not for autotools and gnu export symbol games.
    - oblio 6y ago
      Sys V init was not a standard. Is it in POSIX? I can't find it.
      - tal8d 6y ago
        One of these init systems is run by a guy that is openly hostile to POSIX, the other can be found on several different operating systems and has been around forever. hmmm...
rleigh 6y ago
That was one of the notional reasons, but I (and others) haven't noticed much of a speedup. If anything, it's slightly slower in my experience (though this obviously depends upon the specific configuration). It was also not unique in parallelising startup tasks. Even sysvinit can be configured to do that with insserv+startpar.
michaelmrose 6y ago
I would question whether boot time is such a meaningful target. It's trivial to leave a system up days or weeks relying on hibernation or suspend instead. This seems especially true given that freebsd is even more likely than Linux to see use as a server instead of a desktop. Besides boot time on any init system with a fast ssd seems to be pretty damn quick. Saving 10 seconds every month will take a long time to pay off.
- GordonS 6y ago
  Not so much on servers, but boot time is important on desktop, where most users will power it in only during the day.
  - blackhaz 6y ago
    Desktops can sleep as well. Boot time is important for embedded computers, e.g. in-vehicle systems, but otherwise I don't see why would this be such an issue.
    - mapgrep 6y ago
      Other than desktops, laptops, embedded systems, phones, and tablets, who cares about boot time......... /s
- znpy 6y ago
  I generally agree on relying on suspend/resume, but keep in mind that doing so will greatly reduce your laptop battery lifespan. It's a toll that I decided to accept, but most people aren't aware of that.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Your drain over a reasonable period for example unplug your laptop and shove in into a bag and take it out 1-8 hours SHOULD be relatively small. For example this now admittedly dated review seems so suggest a drain of about 0.6% per hour. https://lifehacker.com/how-much-battery-life-does-sleep-mode-really-drain-5526542 https://lifehacker.com/how-much-battery-life-does-sleep-mode... However the internet is seemingly full of complaints that machines drain fast during sleep so your experience may not be unusual but it might pay to check if something is wrong or at least sub-optimal. For example GPU not actually turning off, usb device keeping it from sleeping, hardware or software waking up your machine.

toast0 6y ago

The default bootloader delay is 10 seconds; you can probably tune that to one or zero, with autoboot_delay="1" in /boot/loader.conf Otherwise, I'm not aware of any easy wins (unless you're running 10.1 or older, in which case set hw.memtest.tests="0" to disable the boot time memory test which is very time consuming if you have a lot of ram and doesn't seem to be very useful; it was disabled in 10.2 and later). If you can see what steps are particularly slow, some of them might be influenced to be a bit faster (eg, if it's waiting on usb scan to mount disks, you can make that time out sooner if it's not necessary on your system; you may be able to do background dhcp instead of synchronous dhcp, etc). But I think someone could spend some real time making it faster to the benefit of those who boot often. Edit: following in the footsteps of cperciva's work; especially the profiling setup.

cperciva 6y ago

Have you tried profiling the FreeBSD boot (https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/percival-profiling_the_freebsd_kernel_boot/ https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/percival-profiling_th...) to see where the time is going? I made some significant speedups a couple years ago, but I'm sure there's still room for further improvements, especially if you have hardware which I didn't test with.

dddddaviddddd 6y ago

> Also, does Zoom work on FreeBSD? Native client: no. The web client is useable though, and virtualization can work: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/freebsd-videoconferencing https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/freebsd-videoconferenci... As others have mentioned the comparatively slow boot is because (for simplicity's sake) the process isn't parallelized. You can install alternate init systems from ports if you want to speed this up.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

0mp 6y ago

I'm running FreeBSD on T480 and after I configured the audio backend in Firefox (one variable in about:config) and the webcamd driver (2 lines in rc.conf) I can do video calls just fine. Both Jitsi and Zoom work as expected.