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Booting A PIII System In .8 Seconds

Posted by timothy on from the no-more-beauty-sleep-time dept.

gizmo_mathboy writes: "General Software has announced the fastest BIOS boot time on record. The embedded system was clocked at 0.8 seconds from system power-on to transfer of control to LILO. This was on an Intel SOYO motherboard (440BX chipset) running a PIII 400. I think the quote of the article is: 'This Embedded BIOS quick-boot operation allows the device to restart and resume operations well within three seconds -- the maximum amount of downtime allowed per year for a device that must support "seven nines" or 99.99999 percent uptime.'"

5 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. that is fast but... by mandria · · Score: 5, Funny

    sometimes i would like to have a sec more to press the delete button to get into the bios and change a few settings.

  2. For those interested in doing this: by merlin_jim · · Score: 5, Funny
    You can find the BIOS they used here. It has to be custom-tuned, but this kit includes the code itself, so you can build the BIOS yourself. They basically disabled most of the checks and auto-configure options; no disk seeks (reasonable enough in a highly reliable system), only check the first word of every 1K memory block, no auto-configure of IDE, etc.

    I've been waiting for something like this for a while! My car MP3 player takes too long to boot up... can't wait to get my hands on this. No mention of cost, but I've sent an e-mail to their contact link and will reply to this message with price if/when they get back to me.

    --
    I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
  3. It's about time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's taken 20 years, but they finally got a system
    that can boot faster than a TRS-80.

  4. Geek by TheLoneCabbage · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wow! Geek perfection! Cold to LILO in 0.8 seconds. Women will flock to me!

    Now if I can just get LILO working again...

    --
    I would rather be ashes than dust!
  5. slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Slashdot also has seven-nine uptime. Except it's not 99.99999%, it's 9.999999%.