Booting A PIII System In .8 Seconds

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.'"

Comments

that is fast but...

[mandria]

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

For those interested in doing this:

[merlin_jim]

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.

Geek

[TheLoneCabbage]

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

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

slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

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