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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.'"

1 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. stinking devices by lildogie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    for a device that must support "seven nines"

    (my emphasis)


    A pet peeve of mine is that PHB's think that "device" uptime is the same as "system" uptime.


    Decades ago, we had fault tolerant systems that had large-chunk redundancy. An entire mainframe could fail and the system kept serving.


    OTOH, haven't you ever had a failing app take down your system, while running on perfectly healthy hardware?


    The reason this misconception, that perfect-hardware==perfect-uptime, frustrates me, is that the PHB's get sold this bill of goods by hardware salespeople. Then they don't even allow for downtime to upgrade the effing OS every two years. Nor do they allow for a second system to either (a) take the load during an upgrade, or (b) test updates to the application.


    For this silly reason, giant, fault-tolerant boxes are hurting, rather than helping, high-availability computing. Bosses would rather spend money on sexy hardware that won't solve the problem, instead of paying smart people who can design-in the uptime with combos of hardware, software, and procedures.

    Quench-rant (for now).