Reboot times

We can procrastinate rebooting at times in this world of “overly busy” and not wanting to waste 5 or 15 seconds. When I had first looked at this question my boot times had gone from 45 seconds to 14 seconds with an SSD and systemd tweaking.

Recently I acquired a “modern” laptop with a NVMe M.2 Gen 3.0 x 4 SSD with blazing 3.4 GB/s Windows read speed and 2 GB/s Linux read speed. So it should be faster right? Um… no. It’s painfully slower:

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 6.823s (firmware) + 4.447s (loader) + 3.467s (kernel) + 8.412s (userspace) = 23.151s

This time is actually after tweaking. It was much worse 80 seconds because nVidia and Dell choose to cut power to HDMI audio on nVidia GTX970M graphics card which drives the HDMI port. As such a setpci command was required which caused “low grapics error” message and you had to wait 20 seconds for mouse pointer to proceed. Then it would reload all graphic drivers and restart lightdm.

Another problem with the “modern” laptop is BIOS POST was taking 15 seconds. Tweaks in BIOS to turn off hardware error checking, turn off loading boot drivers for NICs and other tweaks I can’t remember just now changed BIOS POST time to 6 seconds. By comparison the “old” laptop BIOS POST time was only a couple of seconds using Legacy BIOS CSM and no BIOS tweaking.

Table of Contents

• Reboot times
• Ubuntu’s RapidReboot project from 2010
  • Rationale
  • Use cases
• Using kexec to reboot
  • Kernel must be compiled with CONFIG_KEXEC flag
  • Install kexec-tools
  • Configuring kexec
    • Basic usage are with two commands:
  • Using Systemd to load kexec
• More to come

Ubuntu’s RapidReboot project from 2010

The Ubuntu RapidReboot project mention in ByteCommander’s post is from 2010. The project’s rationale is summed up thusly:

Rationale

There are a few cases where we can safely assume the user does not
want to see the boot loader; in these cases, we should use kexec to
avoid long reboots, BIOS POSTs, and boot loader time. This can take 10
seconds in optimal situations; but with SCSI or RAID BIOS and network
boot roms, the time can climb to 20, 30, or even over 60 seconds, even
in cases where the time between loading the kernel and seeing the
log-in screen is 30-60 seconds.

The project’s usage examples:

Use cases

• Bob has just upgraded his kernel; update-notifier informs him he must reboot for the changes to take effect, and the ‘Restart’ button
  uses kexec to make this faster.
• Alice just upgraded dbus; update-notifier tells her to restart, and uses kexec.
• Seveas has performed several updates in the past month, and now is under three times as much memory pressure due to different programs
  using different copies of shared libraries. He decides to reboot to
  clear this up, and uses a “Quick Reboot” to make this faster.
• Keybuk just installed Ubuntu Edgy and wants to boot into it. The LiveCD loads the target kernel and initrd with kexec; umounts all
  disk-based file systems; sync; and then uses kexec to start the new
  system rather than rebooting.

Using kexec to reboot

kexec is the magic spell we cast to reboot without BIOS post and some other low level discovery mechanisms such as RAID setup.

Kernel must be compiled with CONFIG_KEXEC flag

The first step is to ensure your kernel was compiled with the CONFIG_KEXEC=y option:

$ uname -r
4.14.2-041402-generic
$ grep KEXEC= /boot/config-`uname -r`
CONFIG_KEXEC=y

The first command uname -r is optional just to show what kernel you’ve booted with. As we can see on the second command the kernel is compiled by Ubuntu team with the necessary flag set. Not sure when this was added but likely <= year 2012.

Install kexec-tools

The next step is to install the kexec tools for user space:

$sudo apt install kexec-tools

After normal binary downloads you are greeted with this screen:

I answered No in part because of this bug report that the option is not relevant in systemd.

Then the installation continues (snippet shown below):

Unpacking kexec-tools (1:2.0.10-1ubuntu2.4) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) ...
Processing triggers for systemd (229-4ubuntu21) ...
Setting up kexec-tools (1:2.0.10-1ubuntu2.4) ...
Generating /etc/default/kexec...
Generating grub configuration file ...
  (... CUT ...)
Found Windows Boot Manager on /dev/nvme0n1p2@/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
Found Windows Boot Manager on /dev/sda1@/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
Adding boot menu entry for EFI firmware configuration
done
Processing triggers for systemd (229-4ubuntu21) ...

Configuring kexec

Our cohorts at ArchLinux have great documentation for kexec but it needs massaging for Ubuntu / Debian distributions.

Basic usage are with two commands:

sudo kexec -l /boot/vmlinuz-`uname -r` --initrd=/boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` --reuse-cmdline
sudo kexec -e

from this point forward it appears every time you click reboot it automatically reloads the last kernel in fast reboot mode.

Using Systemd to load kexec

Create the file /etc/systemd/system/kexec-load@.service:

[Unit]
Description=load %i kernel into the current kernel
Documentation=man:kexec(8)
DefaultDependencies=no
Before=shutdown.target umount.target final.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/kexec -l /boot/vmlinuz-%i --initrd=/boot/initrd.img-%i --reuse-cmdline

[Install]
WantedBy=kexec.target

Then enable the service file for the kernel you want to load, for example to simply set the current kernel uname -r:

$ sudo systemctl enable kexec-load@`uname -r`
Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/kexec.target.wants/kexec-load@4.4.0-101-generic.service to /etc/systemd/system/kexec-load@.service.

Then to kexec:

$ sudo systemctl kexec

If you have youtube running there might be a system inhibitor preventing you from rebooting in which case use:

$ sudo systemctl kexec -i

If you wish to load a different kernel for the next kexec, for example 4.12.2-041202-generic, disable the service for the current kernel and enable the one for the new kernel:

$ sudo systemctl disable kexec-load@`uname -r`
$ sudo systemctl enable kexec-load@4.12.2-041202-generic

More to come

I have to post this answer now as it’s time to boot, fix, boot, fix, repeat. I have a complicated setup where systemd loads five nVidia drivers which I have to unload, run setpci to power on audio to hdmi, reload nVidia drivers and restart lightdm. It might take awhile to work out.

After getting the cli methods working I’ll create a desktop shortcut for one-click rebooting with sudo password prompt. After that I’ll create a desktop shortcut to a yad dialog box allowing you to pick from installed kernels to reboot. Similar to grub’s advanced options menu.