The Ubuntu team has released the first beta of Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft. It includes GNOME 2.16, OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 RC2, Xorg 7.1, Linux kernel 2.6.17, and a new init system. Download locations are listed in the release announcement. Update: Kubuntu 6.10 beta 1 has been released as well. Other than that, Ubuntu is taking over the BBC. And all they show is underwear. I don’t get it.
Reading the specifications of the new init system, they seem to have really tried to get the absolute best of all possible worlds. It will be interesting to see if they can pull this off. If they do, I definitely see this adopted very fast by the entire Linux community.
The SysV-style init has been in use for decades. It definitely is mature and the lesser of several evils, but we could do much better. There’s been serious resistance and inertia to changing it, to the extent that although alternatives exist for some time, none of them really “made it”.
If Ubuntu manages to kick the Linux community into upgrading away from the ancient init system they’re using, hats off to them. It will really say something about the level of popularity and acceptance and importance that Ubuntu has reached. None of the other heavyweight distributions has ever managed (or cared enough) to do something like this. That is, to challenge some of the glaring anachronisms that still plague Linux userland.
The thing that stopped all of the other alternative init systems from really replacing sysv style is the fact that they all broke compatibility. Upstart is the first one that is retaining compatibility easing the migration to the new init system. With it being that easy to migrate and the advantages, I don’t see anything that would prevent its adoption.
I have to agree, the good backwards compatibility will allow for a gradual transition which is an absolute killer argument for upstart.
Packages for Debian are already on the way. Other distros are also interested. Let’s see how it evolves.
Exciting times are coming.
I think there may be some resistance to adoption. Ubuntu does not always opensource everything they do. Take, for example, Launchpad; they say they will open source it one of these days. If upstart is not opensourced, I think that this would be a stumbling block for adoption in certain communities.
In the last DistroWatch Weekly, there was a report of a study that Fedora conducted on the current init system. They talked of the drawbacks, and some things they would like to see implemented. To my knowledge, they have not commited to building their own init-like system, but they may. Fedora is really commited to open standards, and because of this I think other distributions would be more willing to help develop/adopt the Fedora system (if it every happens).
If upstart is not opensourced, I think that this would be a stumbling block for adoption in certain communities.
Well, it is FOSS :
http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
Otherwise, why would the Debian folks bother with it?
Upstart is something that they include in the distro. It’s opensource. If you just have cared to visit the URL in the news body you’d know it, but RTFA is boring, isn’t it?
Launchpad is a “software service”. They don’t include it in the distro, obviously. Yes, it’s not opensource. But that doesn’t makes the distro less free.
Newflash: osnews software isn’t opensource either, still your’re using it and leaving posts here just as you’d do in the launchpad bug system. Does it makes osnews worse? google/yahoo/msn search engine isn’t opensource either, still you use it. Etc.
Fedora has http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FCNewInit from the discussions in a year back. Scott from Canonical did send me the upstart specs and plan which I have added to the above page
Edited 2006-09-28 20:42
What I hope is that this new init system will reduce the boot time: on my PC: it takes ~1min(!) for the kernel up to the login window and then around 15s for KDE to start (a stock Kubuntu 6.06 TS), on an Athlon64 3500+ with 1GB of RAM, that’s really poor.
I still remember a stock BeOS booting in around 15s on a Celeron333 with 128Mo of RAM.
~1’15” instead of ~15″ for a similar result on a computer ten times more powerful! Talk about bloat..
“What I hope is that this new init system will reduce the boot time”
Upstart will not work at its full potential in edgy. For this release, the system still uses the sys-v style init scripts. It’s upstart who launches it, through a compatibility system, but it’s *not* what upstart is supposed to do.
THis is done to ease the transition to upstart:
edgy -> upstart + sys-v backwards compatibility + sysv scripts
edgy +1 -> upstart + upstart scripts
Actually, that is incorrect. Scripts in the initscripts package will be modified to use the new system. However, all other scripts will still use the compatibility layer for this release until the next release, where everything will be converted.
I’m running Edgy with upstart on an Athlon64 3200+ with 512 MB of RAM, and I have a 27 second boot time. On Dapper it was around 59 seconds, and without upstart on Edgy it’s around 40 seconds. The goal of upstart is not actually to increase the speed of anything; it’s simply to create a more dynamic system that better deals with hotplugging etc, but one of the convenient side-effects of being event-based is that it does improve boot speed quite a lot. This is using the stock kernel. I have heard of people running a custom 2.6.18 kernel and getting 19 seconds and below for their boot times.
If I might suggest, install bootchart (sudo aptitude install bootchart), reboot, and check /var/log/bootchart/ for the PNG boot graphic. This gives a really nice rundown of your exact boot process, and makes it easy to pinpoint any bottlenecks, zombies, etc, which are causing your boot time to drag out.
You might also find it helpful to profile your boot process. Hit esc at the grub count-down, select the kernel you’re booting, hit “e”, find the line with the kernel boot options (usually the second line), hit “e” again, and at the end of the boot options, type in “profile”. Then hit enter, and then “b” to boot. This will profile all the files that are loaded at boot-time, and order them for more efficient access. It will cause your boot time to be quite a lot slower as it runs the profiling process, but it is one-time only, so if you reboot again after doing this you should find it takes a few seconds off the boot process.
Hope this helps (:
Edited 2006-09-28 22:25
Presumably this will have a positive effect on shutdown times as well?
Upstart will, yes. There is a new shutdown process called teardown, which basically terminates any running process without waiting for it to write data back and declare itself terminated, provided that process does not actually exist in a state where it holds data that needs to be written. Most running processes don’t actually need to be politely ended; it’s things like Apache and MySQL that do, which the average desktop doesn’t run. Stuff like xchat-gnome and alsa-utils can simply be ended without needing to wait for them to acknowledge the shutdown request. A lot of people have commented on how remarkably quick the shutdown process now is (especially on laptops, where this is a real bonus).
I still remember a stock BeOS booting in around 15s on a Celeron333 with 128Mo of RAM.
That is an unreasonable expectation without the proper supporting hardware. Today’s operating sytems have significantly more functionality (which people have asked for) than BeOS ever did. While BeOS did many things and did them well, it didn’t do nearly as much as today’s operating systems. It’s unfair to compare any OS to something that doesn’t have an equal burden.
Well said. I would wager that Edgy+1 will boot in around 15 seconds on reasonably high-end hardware (which will be not so high-end by the time Edgy+1 is released, of course). Average boot times for Edgy beta seem to be about 30-40 seconds on any hardware less than two years old, and this can be reduced to 20-30 seconds by profiling the boot process. Since upstart will be properly implemented in Edgy+1, without having to emulate sysvinit, I would assume that the boot speed will be significantly improved.
So binarycrusader, care to elaborate exactly what OS functionality todays OS’s have over BeOS?
I can’t seem to think of any myself. Sure BeOS lack some in applications but there is no way you can tell me, eye candy aside, that it couldn’t do anything Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS-X or Linux can do now.
Maybe I’m dreaming.
Only 1 thing comes to mind and for a home/workstation OS it ain’t such a big deal. Multi User.
So binarycrusader, care to elaborate exactly what OS functionality todays OS’s have over BeOS?
Gee, I don’t know, true multi-user support?
A fully detailed and functional robust hardware accelerated 3D and 2D API (DirectX)?
A fully detailed and functional hardware input API suitable for supporting game devices (DirectInput)?
A fully detailed and functional sound API suita ble for supporting games (3d Sound Support) and multimedia (DirectSound)?
Fully functional multi-lingual input and display support (IME, xinput, bi-directional language, etc.)?
The list goes on and on, but the point is that BeOS actually was very lacking in several areas that many people take for granted.
BeOS had extremely limited to non-existent implementations of all of the above when compared to current commercial standards or even the standards of that day, notably when looking at games. BeOS had good multi-media support for the time, true, but today’s operating systems provide a *lot* more and that’s the point.
Edited 2006-09-29 03:50
>I don’t know, true multi-user support?
And why should multi-user support add 1min in boot time, reduce the responsiveness ?
As for DirectX, BeOS had OpenGL which does the same thing.
For the other API, sure they are nice to have but they don’t explain the bloat of current OSs.
As for DirectX, BeOS had OpenGL which does the same thing.
DirectX is a comprehensive framework, and considering that BeOS shipped with little to no advanced hardware OpenGL support it was a rather meaningless gesture. There’s little comparison.
I think I have to agree with renox here. 2D/3D architecture, input, sound, and displays are in essence drivers and a processing architecture above it. This means that the startup is nothing more than loading code and config and initializing the devices. Unless something is seriously wrong, code/config are small in size, thus loading it should be in the area of a few seconds, *absolute* maximum. Initializing devices means setting device registers and usually works in less than a second. The computation for all this can be neglected.
I cannot comment on the rest as I don’t know what exactly it is
My point is that today’s long startup times are not directly related to real features, but rather to how they are implemented. For example, a lot of time is wasted when several config files refer to each other in a chain. Loading them means a sequence of alternating I/O and computation, resulting several runs across the hard drive until you’re done, and this is *really* slow compared to anything else.
My Laptop (HP Omnibook XE2, PIII-500 / 128Mb) also boots in 1’15~1’20. But I’m using Gnome.
I must admit boot speed is one of my concern about Linux distro. I don’t have time to dwelve into recompiling the kernel, and gnome to speed things up (I had once, and I did, but now it took 5 hours to recompile the kernel, and days to recompile gnome or KDE on my P2-233).
I would appreciate have a less “dumb” bootup process.
But is it possible with a boot menu to try the standard and the new bootup process?
Will this detect and install drivers for popular wireless internet cards?
I am using Edgy on a Lenovo 3000/N100. The wireless on this laptop was detected correctly and works flawlessly. BTW, hibernatin works well too!
–griznik
Will this detect and install drivers for popular wireless internet cards?
Unless you have something really obscure/proprietary (that doesn’t use the standard chipsets) or bleeding edge, I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
My Airport (wireless b) card has auto detected and worked just fine since Ubuntu 5.10.
I’m not saying nobody has problems with wireless cards these days, but the problems are much further and father between.
Edited 2006-09-28 20:20
Here’s hoping
-n-
Thought they might include support for XGL/Compiz, etc. by default.
Edited 2006-09-28 20:42
Since Edgy is using Xorg 7.1, it enables AIGLX and Composite by default from what I understand. All you need to do is install a compositing manager such as compiz or beryl.
This future of the Linux Desktop is very pretty with lots of eyecandy effects. Some of them even improve usability of the system.
Thanks SEJeff, I’ll give it a go. Hopefully it’s supported when running Ubuntu via Parallels on a MacBook.
I think you’re right, as far as I understand how AIGLX works. Unfortunately, GNOME 2.16 does not come with compositing enabled by default. This is because it does not work well with non-accelerated hardware. We’ll probably need to wait until GNOME 2.18 for this. You can enable compositing in GNOME by recompiling with the compositing build flag (I forget the exact switch, sorry). Until then, you’ll need to install Compiz or Beryl.
You only need to recompile metacity, not gnome. Take a look at this:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/metacity-devel-list/2006-February/ms…
I got a boot time of 19 seconds to login with my custom kernel 2.6.18 in Edgy. Very impressed so far.
I really hope they actually get system-wide font resizing right in this release.
Currently, I can change *nearly* all the default fonts and sizes in Kubuntu, excepting things like (most notably) KDM. For some reason, I can’t change the fonts OR the font sizes in KDM with kControl; and when using an nVidia driver the font sizes increase…
Basically, right now I get the default font larger than can fit in the space allotted, and no way to change it.
My own personnal gripe about the font management is that when I change my screen resolution the fonts apparent size change..
Anyone knows if the 1440×900 resolution is enabled in acer 19″ wide monitors now?, last time it didn’t worked.
My W-19 Fujitsu Siemens was recognized as 1440×1440 so it’s 50% working
http://download.packages.ro/metalink/ubuntu/
use a metalink client (http://www.metalinker.org/implementation.html)
Quite funny to see Clinton using the word Ubuntu. I thought it was just geeks who knew about it, but now it really seems it has a meaning beyond the Debian based OS. And a great meaning at that. I wish Bush would also know the word. And all the other leaders in the world, of course. A little bit of Ubuntu could fix many of the bugs the world has
Bush should know about Ubuntu, at least in principle if not in name, since it is very similar to the meaning of the Greek word agape, which is translated “love” in most English versions of the Bible. Admittedly, agape is a little more specific, and the broader community connotations intrinsic to Ubuntu are only present in agape because of its sociohistoric context (high-context, honor/shame based society as opposed to low-context, guilt/reward based society that most of us live in). Nonetheless, if Bush were a Christian worth his salt, a light would go off in his head when he heard Clinton’s speech (ahaha cough splutter).
“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.” – Matthew 5:13
of course, there’s also:
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” – Matthew 7:3
and
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues.” Matthew 23: 1-6
I figured since we were off on the tangent, I’d chase the rabbit. Remember, no one has exclusive rights to hypocrisy.
Um, I’m familiar with the verses, since I’ve been studying the sermon on the mount recently, but I must confess I’m not certain of your point. Are you criticizing me, or Bush? I mean, I’m happy for you to do the former if you feel it’s warranted; I know I’m replying somewhat late, but if you notice this, do let me know (:
What’s not to understand? :^)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stori…
To shut down they invented Teardown, which basically doesn’t shut down processes that cause no harm when aborted (I think). This should speed up the shut down time, but it’s not nearly as interesting as upstart.
I wish Ubuntu wouldn’t set the default GDM screen size to 1280×1024. I always have to reset it to 1024×768.
I think GDM uses maximum resolution available for your display. If you don’t use it you can edit xorg.conf and delete these resolutions.
Why are long startups such a hot item? It’s not as though you startup your PC 100 times a day. Is it really such a hassle having to wait an extra 45 seconds (for example)?
IE, if you’re using a laptop, you end up booting up more often, especially if suspend in Ubuntu doesn’t work perfectly (which it doesn’t on all laptops, including mine – a Compaq x1000–X comes back up but the mouse and keyboard start doing wierd things).
Well waiting 1min15″ once per day is enough to get annoying, especially when you know that it should take at most 20″.
And the news talk about a new init system, so it’s quite natural to wonder if it will shorten the wait..
Noticed a few people talking about ‘larger apparent fonts when using the nvidia drivers’…I had the same thing until I specified the dpi manually in xorg.conf (mine being 96×96, I believe). YMMV, but it worked for me.
so far neither ubuntu or kubuntu have booted on my system