How to install nosh init system on FreeBSD?

Naturally, the number of whom I personally know is much lower of those I pretend to speak for. Friends & family. Collegues. Myself. (...) Most of them start XfCE, Gnome, or KDE desktop environment with no bells & whistles.
Hi there, I have just created an account to respond to this thread. I was never FreeBSD user, however I regularly use Linux, Mac and Windows. I was recently playing with FreeBSD and the first thing that I have noticed was that it takes pretty long to boot it into working console in vanilla system. I was curious if this is normal, then I found this thread. Therefore I'd like to defend mjollnir arguments, that it does matter how long it takes to boot or reboot the OS, at least this is the first thing you notice when you try FreeBSD.
 
ono I find that boot time is most important among redditors, hobbyists, and other amateurs to the point of distraction. It's as if their world will come crashing down and they will choose their "distro" based on boot time and pretty colors. They seek out such things on Google in order to correct the internet when they have nothing else to do which is often.

In the meantime, the rest of us are trying to make the most technically proficient system on the planet and we succeed at it using FreeBSD. Then we go home to our families and enjoy the fruits of our labor.
 
Hi there, I have just created an account to respond to this thread. I was never FreeBSD user, however I regularly use Linux, Mac and Windows. I was recently playing with FreeBSD and the first thing that I have noticed was that it takes pretty long to boot it into working console in vanilla system. I was curious if this is normal, then I found this thread. Therefore I'd like to defend mjollnir arguments, that it does matter how long it takes to boot or reboot the OS, at least this is the first thing you notice when you try FreeBSD.

I guess the importance kind of depends on how often you are actually booting the systems in question so on a server boot times are mostly an unimportant detail by default and if you are constantly booting your desktop machine you'd likely be better off looking into setting up suspend (which admittedly is not without it's own set of problems on FreeBSD) anyways.

In theory it would probably be nice to have different init options (a simple reliable one that might be a bit slower and a fast just-execute-stuff-asap one that might save some time at the expense of risking to end up in some weird state due to being non deterministic) but such dual approach is easier said than done as a lot of development and even more importantly testing/debugging is practically doubled. Unless some third party wanted to invest a massive amount of manpower into making this happen and keeping it supported it's just not feasible at the moment in my opinion so the reliable approach is obviously the way to go for now.
 
This is funny - some people care about boot times and I have always not cared about them. Sure, I have nvme systems that boot in a couple of seconds, but for my uses cases, it really doesn't matter. Hell, my work laptop, which is an i7 with 16GB ram and Windows 10 enterprise, takes 15 minutes before it is even useable...10 seconds, I wish...
 
Hi there, I have just created an account to respond to this thread. I was never FreeBSD user, however I regularly use Linux, Mac and Windows. I was recently playing with FreeBSD and the first thing that I have noticed was that it takes pretty long to boot it into working console in vanilla system. I was curious if this is normal, then I found this thread. Therefore I'd like to defend mjollnir arguments, that it does matter how long it takes to boot or reboot the OS, at least this is the first thing you notice when you try FreeBSD.
Really? How long is "pretty long"?
What's your hardware?
The slowest part (in my many years of using this OS) is the probing of hardware, especially with exotic setups such as some RAID cards. This could be an area of performance tuning. I find the scanning of the USB bus(es) is very slow.

Oh, and they could ditch sendmail to the ports system, that would give you 10 seconds...

You have to remember, for better or for worse, FreeBSD is a small project that has to carefully pick its focus points. It doesn't have the huge corporate control of other OS. Spending time on reducing the start time of a desktop environment while being predominantly server focused is just a hurdle too high to jump, I would expect.

PS. I think I agreed with Mr mjollnir that FreeBSD could do with a focus on suspend/sleep/wake if only to allow more laptop usage. (Then again this is another example of every manufacturer following their "standards').
 
When you start a typical well-customised Windows 10 (~ 57 % market share), it's take about 2-4 minutes, till HDD stop making zoo noises. But everybody is happy over there!

What's a typical well-customised Windows 10:
  • HDD: Spinning disk (HDD implies no SSD!)
  • Defender: disabled.
  • Fast Startup: disabled (why? because it's a hack similar to the Hybrid Sleep)
  • Optimise drives service (defragsvc): disabled.
  • No 3rd party task in the Task Scheduler (taskschd).
  • DEP aka Data Execution Prevention: turned off.
    bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx alwaysoff
  • Processor Scheduling: background aka service:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl is set to 2 (DWORD)
  • Page File: disabled:
    powercfg -h off
  • IP: static.
PS. There was a discussion between George Neville-Neil and Bryan Lunduke on the youtube. In the middle of conversion George said something which I enjoyed very much. I paraphrase it: "those nice people at FreeBSD".
Linux and Windows users constantly come here, and start off-topic conversions, but we tolerate/answer them civilly. Because we are nice people.
 
For what it's worth, last time I checked the time it takes my machine to fully boot to desktop (HDD, fastboot cheat disabled) the result was:

Windows 10: 02:09
FreeBSD/KDE: 01:25

Works for me.
 
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my work laptop, which is an i7 with 16GB ram and Windows 10 enterprise, takes 15 minutes before it is even useable.
My wife uses Windows for QuickBooks. In the morning she often complains it isn't connected to the internet. I tell her to wait a minute and, sure enough, it eventually connects.

She usually leaves it on all the time. If I ever have to fix something for her, rebooting takes ages as you describe.
 
I think it's just that Windows is really a terrible product. It's overly complex, the UI is inconsistently designed and yes, it works, but not very well in my opinion, at least for normal desktop tasks. I use it to host my World of Warcraft icon and that's it 😆
 
How long exactly? It shouldn't take more than 10-20 seconds.
Really? How long is "pretty long"?
What's your hardware?
FreeBSD 12.1 takes 10 seconds to boot to text mode login prompt after I have put my hostname into /etc/hosts otherwise sendmail_submit and sendmail_msp_queue start take additional 30 sec, but this is different subject -> https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/s-why-do-hostname-and-sendmail-steps-at-boot-take-so-long.44801/

10 sec may be not that much, but same machine Arch Linux 5.9 takes 6 seconds to Xorg SDDM graphical login prompt. My machine is i7-8700 with NVME disk.

The slowest part (in my many years of using this OS) is the probing of hardware, especially with exotic setups such as some RAID cards. This could be an area of performance tuning. I find the scanning of the USB bus(es) is very slow.
It seems in my case scanning hardware up to USB takes 6 seconds, then USB enumeration takes additional 2 sec, DHCP 1 sec and then starting services just 1 sec. So that hardware enumeration is kind of slow comparing to Linux. Of course one may argue that booting faster is not a top priority, but on other hand if you need to upgrade kernel it is nice to have shortest possible reboot downtime.

I think it's just that Windows is really a terrible product. It's overly complex, the UI is inconsistently designed and yes, it works, but not very well in my opinion, at least for normal desktop tasks.
I agree, especially there on overall complexity, or rather bloat. Still takes just 10-12 sec to boot into desktop and run hundreds of weird services on my slightly older i7-6700 with SATA SSD ;)
 
Boot is plenty fast on SATA SSD and even faster on NVME SSD's. Main time is spent on hw detection, not on service execution
 
Doesn't Linux run many startup tasks in the background now? So even though you may be looking at a pretty login screen, many of the services are still loading.
Just like Windows you can see this in services.msc. They call it "Delayed Start". I find both a little pointless. Even on consumer devices like phones because you tend to not restart that much anyway.

Now that you have fixed your misconfiguration with hosts and sendmail, it is surely quite an acceptable boot time now?

10 seconds vs 6 seconds is barely enough time for me to take a sip of coffee. Sure, you can cut the Linux boot time down even more by using Wayland rather than Xorg but then you would lose even more functionality.
 
Doesn't Linux run many startup tasks in the background now? So even though you may be looking at a pretty login screen, many of the services are still loading.

Well, define Linux ;) My installations certainly don't do that but then this means a whole lot of nothing on a broader scale.
 
The rc init system takes 8 seconds on my Core 2 Duo. Total boot time is longer. Swapping rc for nosh can only improve on the 8 seconds. The rest of the boot time is device discovery, device initialization, and waiting on external services like DHCP. Nosh can do nothing for these other parts of the boot time.
 
systemd, is not an example to follow, its a bloated rubbish, on any linux system's I have I put the old system back.

In my view FreeBSD should stick with its simple init system, a faster bootup, is not important, I dont reboot my servers more than once or twice a year usually.
 
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