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Booting Linux In Three Seconds
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).
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.
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...
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
... how about replacing this really stupid, crappy and annoying partition-scheme that seems to cripple the x86-architecture?
... what *is* that?
Primary, extended... etc.
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....
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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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>