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Booting Linux In Three Seconds

Posted by timothy on from the performance-anxiety dept.

cramhead writes: "Some very cool technology that motherboard manufacturers should consider adopting. Using Linux to boot a system allows flexibility and speed. Thought the world deserved a look at [the LinuxBIOS homepage]" This project sounds similar to the OpenBios project which has mentioned before on Slashdot, but a lot has happened since then, and even since CmdrTaco last posted about LinuxBIOS. The news page indeed reveals that (with certain motherboards), adventurous flashers-of-RAM can have Linux up in three seconds, and they promise improvements even on that. They also note that LinuxBIOS is working with an Alpha DS10 and with an Athlon / SiS730S combination. (This may also remind you of the etherboot project).

11 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Better System Configs by LuxuryYacht · · Score: 4

    Very fast boot times isn't the only great feature of LinuxBIOS. LinuxBIOS can boot Linux and other OS's like Be or QNX, though it's not for Dos or Windows since they rely heavily on the legacy BIOS for certain features of operation that LinuxBIOS doesn't bother with. LinuxBIOS has a very stripped down linux kernel that just sets up some basic features of a PC better than many OEM BIOSes (memory, cache, super I/O) and then jumps to loading whatever kernel you wish to take the system from there.

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    Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
  2. Re:Useful for Windows, maybe... by warpeightbot · · Score: 5
    What would be really cool is a way to upgrade your kernel without rebooting, like QNX...
    Ask and ye shall receive...

    http://www.scyld.com/products/beowulf/software/mon te.html

    It's called Two Kernel Monte. It's a module that loads a new kernel into memory, does a little do-si-do dance to get it where it needs to be in the mode it needs to be in, then simply jumps to it. (Yes, you need to do

    umount -a;mount -o ro,remount /

    before doing this, since it doesn't do any of that...) No, it's not an in situ change, since all your processes die, but for systems with multiple SCSI or RAID cards, it can mean the difference in a few seconds for reboot and a few long minutes....

    On a side note, make sure and grab my link; the one on Google is wrong (until they fix it), and it took me a while to find the right thing...

    --
    Never assume TFM is right.

  3. Useful for Windows, maybe... by tbo · · Score: 5

    This would be useful for Windows, considering how often you need to reboot.

    Why would you need it for Linux, though? I mean, who reboots more than once every major kernel upgrade? What would be really cool is a way to upgrade your kernel without rebooting, like QNX...

    1. Re:Useful for Windows, maybe... by istartedi · · Score: 4

      It sounds like you're coming from a server mentality, where uptime is a big concern. Most home users treat their computers like their TVs.

      Todays computers are, with regards to starting, where the old black-n-white vacuum tube Philco TVs were. They took a while to warm up.

      At some point in the future, people will reminisce over how computers used to take a minute to "boot up". Actually, as computing has progressed, boot times have been an on and off problem (no pun intended). The old 8-bit home machines loaded the OS from ROM and booted up virtually in an instant. In an ironic twist, the introduction of inexpensive hard drives for home PCs probably caused a big step backwards in terms of boot up time. It became cheaper to just load the OS from the HD. At some point, we'll figure out a way to have our cake and eat it too. I'm thinking that cheap, fast solid-state hard drives would be a great thing.

      By then, computers will be so established that nobody will talk about operating systems anymore. What OS you run will matter as much as the details of the circuits in your TV. They will all perform about the same, and everybody will know how to build them so that they run with approximately the same reliability. That kind of puts the whole "free vs. proprietary" software debate in perspective. Given time, it simply won't matter because all technology tends to march slowly towards commoditization anyway.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  4. Re:Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! by ksheff · · Score: 4

    Go to their site and read some of the pages. This started at Los Alamos _for_ their Beowulf clusters exactly for that reason.

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    the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
  5. Re:What's the point? by ksheff · · Score: 5

    This would be useful in building internet/compute appliances with standard PC motherboards. People have come to expect a device to be on instantly when they hit the power button. How successful do you think a modern TV would be if it took 20-30 seconds before the user could do anything? In their case, they wanted to have the ability to add a compute node to their Beowulf cluster, turn it on, and have it ready for work in a few seconds.

    --
    the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
  6. Now that you are replacing BIOS by Mekanix · · Score: 5

    ... how about replacing this really stupid, crappy and annoying partition-scheme that seems to cripple the x86-architecture?

    Primary, extended... etc. ... what *is* that?

    I *really* miss the way Amiga did it. Partition your drive as you see fit. Use *naming* instead of numbering of partitions. Remove, add, split, join partition without affecting the other partitions and needs to reconfigur (eg. hda9 suddenly become hda8 or hda10 or something).

    Just my 2 cents....

  7. Hard drive Content Control by Odinson · · Score: 4
    I've noticed the absence of discussion of the HDCC threat.

    If such a thing went through, having a open source bios image to flash might be the only thing that saves us from Dumb/Prejudical/Just-Plain-Evil(TM) HD access restictions.

    EX: The BIOS refuses see LILO in the boot sector...

    Trivial now, Vital Later.

    --
    Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
  8. How about... by silent_poop · · Score: 4

    ...WinBIOS? "Boot in 3 hours!"

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    silence is poetry.
  9. Any Linux have hybernate? by Speare · · Score: 5

    Maybe I've been out of the Linux distro comparison charts, but do any of the Linux kernels or distributions have hibernate support?

    (Hibernate: all power goes off, and the hard drive's boot sector is set to load memory and processor state directly from a memory mapped chunk of the disk, avoiding all the individual component loading time.)

    My laptop's now a few months old, and I have never truly rebooted it: every day I just open the lid and up pops Windows 2000, right where I left it. It's never bluescreened(*). I use a 11Mbps wireless LAN to read in bed. I love the fast boot from hibernation, especially when battery time is already less than a transcontinental flight.

    (*) It's the drivers that'll kill Windows 95/98/NT/2K. The system isn't well-written to deal with shitty third parties like ATI, but a laptop's setup is pretty simple and doesn't depend on flaky bizarre upgrades of drivers all the time. Months of uptime (minus hibernate at night and driving), no bluescreen.

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    [ .sig file not found ]
  10. More useful than 3 second boot by sjames · · Score: 5

    I have been working on getting LinuxBIOS ready for sale in commercial systems. The three second boot is interesting, but really isn't a major attraction for servers. The real advantages are reliability, full configurability over serial console, diskless operation, built in rescue disk, and an OpenFirmware like capability.

    A Flash chip is much more reliable and convieniant than a boot floppy. It is possable to use a flash boot image remotely over a serial console even if the root filesystem on the HD is damaged to the point of being unmountable. The kernel in the Flash just has to mount a rescue root fs in the chip (using the nftl driver in the MTD patch).

    In normal operation, the LinuxBIOS kernel will boot up, and either mount the boot partition or load the final kernel image from a boot server. Then it used the two kernel monte module (kmonte) to boot into the final running kernel. Should that step fail, the rescue image can page the sysadmin for help.

    For diskless operation, the final kernel loads from the server and mounts it's root via NFS. GFS over fibre channel is also a possability.

    Currently, I have a prototype Scyld cluster where the slave nodes boot from LinuxBIOS. The slave nodes are not capable of video. I also have prototype with a 2.4 kernel that comes up with a fb_console.

    <PLUG nature="shameless">Go to http://www.linuxlabs.com/linuxbios.html for FAQ on our 1U server and Scyld cluster systems using LinuxBIOS. They will be ready for sale in a few days.</PLUG>