Rocklyte Systems‘ Athene operating environment is at once fascinating and frustrating. It’s a custom GNU/Linux distribution optimized for i686 machines that employs a proprietary graphics toolkit and video drivers, which means it’s visually impressive and extremely speedy. Athene is by far the most unique and technologically advanced GNU/Linux derivative to date, but it needs some better administrative features and it doesn’t come with much software. Linux.com has the full review.
Athene 2004 reviewed
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It should be noted that in the benchmarks I’ve done (and posted on OSNews), the proprietory NVIDIA driver is measurably faster than the NVIDIA SNAP driver. While Athene does still seem faster on NVIDIA hardware (lightweight toolkit, simpler graphics, no applications complex enough to stress the display system), it won’t actually *be* faster.
What programs did you use to benchmark 2D performance? At the time I did my SNAP Graphics testing, the Nvidia driver was hell to install with the distributions I had available. That was part of the point though, because SNAP installed and worked so much easier.
Something I mentioned in the Athene review… when the OS “feels” faster, it actually is. There is no way to make an operating system (or more appropriately, operating environment) “Feel” faster without actually making it faster in some way.
-Jem
its entirely possible to make an OS feel faster than it actually is.
for example, if a program loads a splash screen with a status bar, even if the entire program takes the same time to load, it will “seem” as if it is faster, when in reality it is just perception.
I use Athene on top of Debian Testing and the combination is quite wonderful; a fast, clean ui on top of the Linux kernel with all my apps an apt-get away. I’m not sure how good the stand alober version is since I’ve never used it.
From an end user perspective, if something feels faster, it is faster.
Only geeks like us waste our time and CPU cycles performing benchmarks.
“the Nvidia driver was hell to install with the distributions I had available. That was part of the point though, because SNAP installed and worked so much easier. ”
When was that? The Nvidia driver has been pretty moron-proof to install for a while now on most popular distributions.
What’s difficult about ‘sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6106-pkg1.run’? It worked like a champ for me on Debian unstable. I find it difficult to believe that it would harder on RH, SUSE, or other popular distribution.
There is no way to make an operating system (or more appropriately, operating environment) “Feel” faster without actually making it faster in some way.
That is patently untrue. Lot’s of tricks are used to make the OS “feel” faster, while actually making things slower. Take OS X, for example. It buffers all updates in secondary buffers, even though this takes way more RAM and a little bit of extra CPU time. However, it entirely removes flicker and visible redraw during updates. Also, consider synchronized window resizing. It works by slowing down the window frame resize to be no faster than the content resize. 10fps content resize with 10fps frame resize looks a whole lot better than 10fps content resize and 100 fps frame resize.
The more interesting thing I found about this Linux based distro is in their main webpage:
“Features Summary
[..]
Fast booting – as quick as 4 seconds.
[..]”
Even my Linux kernel takes more than that to load. I suspect that they has customised their linux kernel so that it loads fast, and then they’ve customised their init script so that their “graphical subsystem” (Pandora) is launched just after kernel is loaded – then processes like syslog, alsa, kernel modules, etc are launched in the background.
Is that true ? Do they use bootsplash ? How much time does it take to boot ?..
Yes, the most interesting question for users was not answered by this … so called… review
So I asked here: does it really boot in 4 seconds? From 1st harddrive seek to login screen?
I can’t imagine this, this would be nearly as fast as my c64 😉
Thanks a lot all people here for the most interesting answer!
hac, the new nvidia script is more of a pain on RH because you have to go through a whole buncha bs to reboot at runlevel 3 so that X doesn’t start automatically. the nvidia installer just spits a ‘you can’t run the installer while x is running’ error and dies leaving the hapless user to google for an answer.
On my Athene install (Pentium 3 600MHz laptop, 192MB RAM), it takes about 45 seconds to get from the bootloader to the login screen. For this machine, that’s pretty fast (about half the time it takes to boot Windows 2000 or VectorLinux), and there are possibly extenuating circumstances surrounding my installation and bootloader.
Very fast, but still disappointing…
OK, I see where the need to change runlevels could be a problem. And Nvidia’s instructions to edit inittab are just plain bad advice. Logging in as root and typing ‘telinit 3’ is much simpler. Rebooting is not required.
I like runlevels and the whole SysVinit system. It’s well worth learning about inittab, runlevels, and controlling services through the /etc/init.d/* scripts. But not everyone uses SysVinit, and not everyone places the scripts in the sameplace, not everyone defines the same default runlevels. So Nvidia has a difficult task documenting how to shut down X before installing their drivers. They can do better, and should.
It is very useful to know how to start, stop, restart, or reload services. It’s also good to know how easy it is to pass boot parameters, such as the runlevel, from GRUB. I don’t expect my mother to know how, but I don’t expect her to know how boot Windows into safe mode, either. I do expect Jem to know these things.
At 600 MHz the worst case should be no more than 20 seconds. You might want to run with the debug kernel option to see if it gets stuck on a particular area of hardware. Make sure your BIOS settings are optimised and check the speed of your harddisk with hdparm.
There is a 400 MHz machine here that is used for benchmarking worst case scenarios and it does < 20 seconds, or 10-12 without hotplugging. On that basis I’d recommend experimenting a little and you could yield better results.
I see that you’re someone from rocklyte, so I ask:
What about putting hotplug in the background while the graphical login manager is already loaded ? That way maybe you could get the 10-12 seconds booting in that machine still having the benefits of hotplugging. BTW, Which services are usually started before/after Pandora? Do you use parallel services startup ?
Does anyone know about my other questions ? Thanks in advance :-).
Related: See the next thread in gentoo to see how to improve gentoo boot speed: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=131142
Hey guys, maybe this tip will help ease your pain. I remember having the same problem with RH until I learned this simple little trick…
1) use your fav editor and open your grub or lilo config file.
2) duplicate the entry used for booting RH (or its derivative).
3) at the end of the duplicated RH entry, simply add the word… single
4) rename the duplicated entry to indicate that it will be starting in run level 3.
The next time you boot up, if you choose that newly added entry, you will be greeted with a prompt
Yes, Athene starts services in parallel once it gets to the login screen (as of version 4.1 at least). With that in mind we could run the hotplugging script as one of those services, but some things like the audio drivers must be started prior to the login screen.
The plan is to simply program hotplugging into Athene itself, it won’t take long and will work out much better that way
I use simpleinit and hotplug to boot linux 2.6.7 in less than 8 seconds flat, Either I’m not trying hard enough or it’s time to get the old rolex cleaned.
Thanks for the suggestions. Alas, these are all out of my technical expertise, and as I’m very busy these days, I don’t have the time/strength to do the requesite research.
I look forward to whatever out-of-the-box solutions v4.1 will offer (as per your response to Edulix).