What is the minimum boot time of FreeBSD?

The FreeBSD init system just takes a looooong time and although I am just running it in a VM right now when I actually use FreeBSD for desktop usage the bootup time might be a problem. When windows took too long to boot I would end up doing nothing productive. It breaks the flow. I am gonna use the OpenRC or Runit systems but I was just wondering is it possible to make the time even shorter like clear Linux? (I know this goes against the forum rules but I am just curious)
 
It takes a while, it's not that bad though (kind of quaint). You don't need to reboot as often because there aren't kernel updates every other day. A lot less often.



Ricer gonna rice.
I don't see why I would keep my laptop open 24/7 that's power consumption gone to waste
 
I'm willing to bet the reason it's slow to boot is due to relatively slow I/O on the VM. Picking the right controller can make a world of difference. It also helps to know which VM software you're using. Virtualbox? VMWare? Qemu? And what's the type of the laptop this runs on? Some old laptop from the '90s? Or is it a last generation Core i5/i7? Does the laptop have a slow 5400 RPM 2.5 inch disk or does it have NVMe disks? This can make a world of difference too.
 
Too long like several minutes? please give more information about your system. I used to run FreeBSD on a VM, but boot time was fast. I don't have a SSD but my boot time is less than 20 seconds.
 
Here a virtual, blank FreeBSD (official VM-image used with bhyve) boots to the login in less than 8 seconds; My bare metal machine with many, many things takes less than 12 seconds to the X11 login. But does that say anything?
 
Mine is i3 4gb ram ssd and ik VMs are not suitable for comparison but the wiki says 25 seconds which is a lil worrying for my PC because a fresh install of windows on my pc took 3 secs to boot up but windows after 3 years the boot time became 20 minutes. I am running qemu. I am not using the vm time as a metric but the wiki time.
I'm willing to bet the reason it's slow to boot is due to relatively slow I/O on the VM. Picking the right controller can make a world of difference. It also helps to know which VM software you're using. Virtualbox? VMWare? Qemu? And what's the type of the laptop this runs on? Some old laptop from the '90s? Or is it a last generation Core i5/i7? Does the laptop have a slow 5400 RPM 2.5 inch disk or does it have NVMe disks? This can make a world of difference too.
 
Here a virtual, blank FreeBSD (official VM-image used with bhyve) boots to the login in less than 8 seconds; My bare metal machine with many, many things takes less than 12 seconds to the X11 login. But does that say anything?
My PC on Manjaro or openSUSE took 10 secs from pressing the power button to get to sddm
 
What? When I had an hdd the actual OS didn't even run you must have some good specs and about 10 mins in vm.
Too long like several minutes? please give more information about your system. I used to run FreeBSD on a VM, but boot time was fast. I don't have a SSD but my boot time is less than 20 seconds.
 
Mine is i3 4gb ram ssd and ik VMs are not suitable for comparison but the wiki says 25 seconds which is a lil worrying for my PC because a fresh install of windows on my pc took 3 secs to boot up but windows after 3 years the boot time became 20 minutes. I am running qemu. I am not using the vm time as a metric but the wiki time.
Windows 10 isn't shutting down, it is only hibernating. So comparing the time it takes to resume from suspend to a full boot isn't useful. Additionally windows won't start a lot of (essential) services until after login - so you still wait some time after login to actually get a useful system.

Also, running VMs on such a low-spec machine, especially on top of windows (which is by far the slowest and most resource-trashing "hypervisor" you can get) is doomed to fail. Anything below 8GB RAM shouldn't be even considered to run a VM that is supposed to run a desktop environment. But even then - comparing a VM to a bare-metal boot won't get you anywhere either. Most of my Open- and FreeBSD VMs (on bhyve) easily boot up in less than 20 seconds - on bare metal with some HBAs you won't even be at the POST screen in that amount of time...
 
I am not running VMs on windows that's just impossible this is openSUSE Tumbleweed
Windows 10 isn't shutting down, it is only hibernating. So comparing the time it takes to resume from suspend to a full boot isn't useful. Additionally windows won't start a lot of (essential) services until after login - so you still wait some time after login to actually get a useful system.

Also, running VMs on such a low-spec machine, especially on top of windows (which is by far the slowest and most resource-trashing "hypervisor" you can get) is doomed to fail. Anything below 8GB RAM shouldn't be even considered to run a VM that is supposed to run a desktop environment. But even then - comparing a VM to a bare-metal boot won't get you anywhere either. Most of my Open- and FreeBSD VMs (on bhyve) easily boot up in less than 20 seconds - on bare metal with some HBAs you won't even be at the POST screen in that amount of time...
 
What? When I had an hdd the actual OS didn't even run you must have some good specs and about 10 mins in vm.
My CPU is Intel i7-4790K (8 core) 4.00 GHz and RAM 16 GB. When I used a VM (KVM), dedicated nearly half of my hardware to VM but boot time didn't even take a minute.
 
Why would a fresh install start services that I don't need? Coming from linux a fresh install of any distro except bloated distros would not start unnessecary services.
Simple, don't start services you don't need. This isn't rocket science.
 
I am not running VMs on windows that's just impossible
Really? So Hyper-V, Virtualbox and VMWare don't work on Windows?

Why would a fresh install start services that I don't need? Coming from linux a fresh install of any distro except bloated distros would not start unnessecary services.
A base install of FreeBSD doesn't enable much by default (only devd(8), syslogd(8), sshd(8) and perhaps sendmail(8)). But X and KDE (assuming that because you mentioned sddm) are not part of base OS install. You enabled those yourself.
 
Most of my VMs boot so fast I often wonder if they rebooted at all. I have to check uptime(1) to see that it actually did.
same for the VMs on my workstation - they reside on a pool on a 2x NVMe mirrored vdev. A full reboot from "shutdown -r now" until I can login via ssh again in ~5 seconds or even less for a 'small' (in terms of heavy and slowly stopping services) VM is pretty standard nowadays... Usually on VMs it takes (much) longer to stop the services (especially stuff like databases) than to actually reboot the OS. This gets even more true in jails, where the actual "reboot" is done within 1-2 seconds...

But again: Hardware resources are key when running VMs! You absolutely need enough memory or your host is constantly busy swapping which completely kills the VMs. Same goes for spinning rust when trying to run extremely I/O heavy OSes (windows with its horribly inefficient registry) in a VM. Windows in a VM will just completely trash even bigger ZFS pools on spinning disks due to its horrible I/O patterns at boot...
 
I am not running VMs on windows that's just impossible this is openSUSE Tumbleweed
Sorry, I somehow implied by your first message(s) that you are running windows on the host, because you refered to windows boot times...

Still: 4GB is barely enough for even a single OS with a full-blown DE, especially bloated ones like KDE/Gnome, let alone a second OS in a VM that is supposed to run the same amount of bells and whilstles...
 
Back
Top