I've been working on my boot time lately, but I realize I really don't have a good handle on what it should be. I am hoping some of you will share yours so we can all get a feel for it. I'm including some HW specs here also because I've heard it can be relevant:
64GB RAM, 2 x 2 TB NVME:
Startup finished in 9.922s (firmware) + 1.151s (loader) + 3.506s (kernel) + 4.006s (userspace) = 18.586s
graphical.target reached after 4.003s in userspace.
Literally don't personally care about boot time, as long as it's under 30-60s (currently at about ~5?), and since I reboot like once a month, I don't really pay much attention to it. How come you want to minimize that so much? Any particular target you want to achieve?
I really just wanted to get a gauge on what a good range is. For my machine, I just want to see how low I can get it without sacrificing needed features or maintainability. 10s would be amazing.
a few minutes. Usually I expect 2, claim 5, but when updating gitlab or something equally bloated I'll need 7-10 for the patch-and-bounce.
no one cares whether it takes a minute extra while you're getting coffee or when it's in the middle of the night. The #1 selling feature of systemd is thus moot and it's truly just a piece of hot garbage.
# systemd-analyze time
Startup finished in 39.050s (firmware) + 6.680s (loader) + 993ms (kernel) + 3.519s (initrd) + 22.326s (userspace) = 1min 12.570s
graphical.target reached after 21.680s in userspace.
for me, most time is used until the bootloader shows up, because I had to disable "fast boot" in bios because it made some problems on rebooting. pressing enter in grub could speed up 5 seconds more ;-)
gentoo, systemd, 2x2tb nvme, 32 gb ram, 4 hdds. could be faster, but it mostly doesn't matter because I power on the system every morning but don't use it right away
edit:
on my server, which is not UEFI, therefore has no "firmware" part:
# systemd-analyze time
Startup finished in 1.814s (kernel) + 47.640s (initrd) + 36.602s (userspace) = 1min 26.057s
graphical.target reached after 36.602s in userspace.
and on my laptop, which boots fast AF
# systemd-analyze time
Startup finished in 4.242s (firmware) + 14.631s (loader) + 1.737s (kernel) + 3.210s (initrd) + 5.136s (userspace) = 28.959s
graphical.target reached after 4.936s in userspace.
About twenty seconds from 'power button' to 'desktop' on my laptop, about two minutes on my desktop, mainly because it's got about 9 disks in it in various RAID patterns, and a discrete graphics card and fancy USB audio and all that shit needs initialised. Doesn't matter much, they both sleep / hibernate and rarely need restarted
We're talking seconds, but on top of 'twenty seconds' then it's a large fraction of the total. The real problem is mounting disks in RAID for me, though - takes quite a while.