Making EC2 boot time 8x faster

Re:Making EC2 boot time 8x faster by solarengineer on Friday May 24, 2024 @10:29AM (#40466634)

Not an AWS example, but on my Illumos Zones on an i5 at Hetzner, I get from zero to ssh in under 50 ms. I am certain of the numbers since I have used DTrace to measure. It is unfortunate that Ilumos is not popular enough for a multitude of reasons.

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Re:Making EC2 boot time 8x faster by solarengineer on Friday May 24, 2024 @10:46AM (#40466797)

I should add - this is a full Zone with a number of services. One of my half-finished projects was to trace the call graph of the various services started and disable those not needed.

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Re:Making EC2 boot time 8x faster by necovek on Friday May 24, 2024 @01:35PM (#40468464)

Wow, that's amazing!

I wonder if I should try out Illumos as I am rebuilding my home server, but I am afraid that due to lack of time, it'd take me ages to replicate my libvirt-based setup with around 30 services.

How well are Linux containers and VMs supported in Illumos? How about nested KVM? That could help with the transition as I am heavily leaning into GNU tools and KVM.

FWIW, when I first laid my eyes on a Sun workstation back in the 90s and seen the Control key where it rightly belongs (in the place of Caps Lock in broken layouts :), I said "duh" and have never moved back from remapped Caps-as-Ctrl.

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Re:Making EC2 boot time 8x faster by solarengineer on Friday May 24, 2024 @11:56PM (#40472544)

You could use SmartOS to achieve the same.

Linux containers no longer run natively and instead need to run within VMs.

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Re:Making EC2 boot time 8x faster by oblio on Tuesday May 28, 2024 @07:12AM (#40499536)

> It is unfortunate that Ilumos is not popular enough for a multitude of reasons.

It's complicated but you can blame Sun for a lot of that, the primary thing was their explicit choice of license to make it incompatible (or hard-to-make-compatible with Linux).

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