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%.

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.

stinking devices

[lildogie]

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).