3. System Improvement

Improving Performance

In order to increase the performance of Athena OS, several measures have been considered.

Athena is mainly based on Arch Linux, so it inherits all its benefits.

Compared to Debian-based systems, Athena uses pacman as Package Manager, that is faster than apt, and offers automatic dependency resolution and allows for more automated system upgrades.

Furthermore, it uses systemd as init framework. systemd performs tasks neatly and avoids all the UN-necessary delay.

Athena can afford a large array of binary package repositories as well as the Arch User Repository.

Athena aims to be a rolling release system, making packages available to the distribution a short time after they are released upstream.

As Arch, Athena provides more expedient support for building custom, installable packages from outside sources, with a ports-like package build system.

Athena uses lz4 for fast compression and decompression. It means higher speed at boot time. It is reached by editing /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and uncommenting #COMPRESSION=lz4.

In the future other measures could be evaluated in order to speedup the system, by considering these implementations:

• The usage of systemd hook instead of base and udev hooks in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf for building initramfs
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance/Boot_process
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Minimal_initramfs
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance

Kernel Configuration

Changes to the kernel can impact the performance and the operativity of the system. In Arch Linux distros, the configuration for the running kernel is stored in the kernel binary and can be retrieved with zcat /proc/config.gz. Details: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/176307/where-can-i-find-the-kernel-configuration-on-each-linux-distribution