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

.8 sec... SO?

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

OK, while that's a pretty nice thing, what's the big deal? That .8 sec is only [button push] to the lilo prompt. So? The box STILL has to boot. What if you've got a box that still has to fire up a bunch of daemons before it's even online and usable? What if it was a dirty shutdown (and the silly fool is still running ext2) with a nGig drive(s)? How does this help uptime?

Re:Do we want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

>I mean, seriously, what's the big deal if it's >0.8 seconds from power to LILO? I, personally, >would rather have a BIOS that takes a few >seconds to check the RAM, auto-detect devices, >and check SCSI drives before it tries to boot >the system.

It says "embedded system". If you put a cpu in as a brake or steering controller into something that moves at any reasonable speed, you would like it to return service as soon as possible after a power glitch.

No, this does not mean that they make embedded controllers with crashes as a design goal. It means they want to make something that is as error-resistant as possible. Not for your desktop box, in other words.

Obtw: very few of those systems have anything like Linux or Windows on them, even though some people would like to tell you otherwise.

Re:There was no PIII/400

[flatrock]

http://developer.intel.com/design/intarch/pentiumi ii/pentiumiii.htm

It shows a low power pentium III at 400 MHz.

Re:For those interested in doing this:

[merlin_jim]

It's VERY random... between 8 and 15 seconds... one of these days, I'll get a website up about it... but its running on an old PII, Slackware 5.4 (a good release that supports all the hardware I need and none that I don't, that I'm very familiar with kernel hacking in)... The LILO to music time is about 3 seconds (due mostly to compiling the kernel with only the modules I need and tuning the startup scripts), but it takes 8 to 15 seconds to get there...

Re:.8 sec... SO?

[Telek]

you think that you can fit everything that you need for a linux or windows bootup in 8MB of flash? You think that you can fit BOTH of them?

The linux kernel is small, yes, but that's because all of the needed modules and drivers aren't in it! They're loaded on the hard drive.

Not to mention that flash is very slow... and expensive...

You'd be better off to store a memory image of a booted kernel at the beginning of your hard drive, along with all necessary information to initialize all of the hardware. Just have a small bootstrap/lilo type of thing that quickly loads up enough to access the hard drive and file system, then load the rest into memory directly, then initialize the hardware.

But I reboot so infrequently that it doesn't really matter how long it takes. Hell, I have my system set to do a full memory check on bootup. It takes an extra 45 seconds, so what?

And stop bashing windows... My W2K Server has been up for 145 days now and counting. Check it out along with CodeRedII attack info realtime (yeah, shameless plug) =>

Fast Boot is also a User Interface issue

[drivers]

Even though this BIOS was intended for embedded machines, fast boot is also important for desktop PCs. Consider the Canon Cat designed by Jef Raskin (see "The Humane Interface" by Raskin). It takes a very short amount of time to boot, all you have to do is start typing and the computer powers on and loads the operating system, putting the cursor in the document exactly where you left it off. Not only that, but there is a hardware buffer for the keyboard so that it doesn't even lose the keys you typed while it was booting up. Now that is a computer designed with the user in mind. I'd like to make a PC operating environment and the first thing I'd do is make sure it boots fast. I was thinking the BIOS would be the slow part but if it's possible to speed that up, then that is all the better.

Tandy 1000HX

[fishbowl]

Am I the only one here who remembers DOS3.3 machines that had DOS in ROM? By the time you took your finger off the power button, you were at the prompt, or your autoexec had run.

2.2 Seconds

[B.D.Mills]

Now that we've got a PIII booting in 0.8 seconds, to achieve "seven nines", we have 2.2 seconds spare. What can we do with this time? I'm sure we can do a lot of valuable system maintenanace in this time that we would not have otherwise been able to do.

We could:

• Swap out a dead power supply.
  
• Replace a faulty memory module.
  
• Swap the UPS for one that has its own in-built generator.
  
• Put fluffy dice over the console.
  
• Change the grey cables for ones in designer colours.
  
• Wave a dead chicken over the console.
  
• Upgrade the mainboard.
  
• Look busy so marketing can't have the latest item in their wish list installed.
  
• Remove the thing that marketing wanted installed because it's making the system unstable. If it's not unstable, you would not be rebooting, would you?

Of course, you might have to work fast....