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Software Tweak Makes Linux Boot In Under 200 ms
An anonymous reader writes "A version of Linux has been created that radically speeds up system boot time -- to less than 200 milliseconds (ms) from power-up to application code startup. The techniques, created by Real-time Linux vendor FSMLabs, are processor independent, and boot times of under 100 mS are expected in the future." Update: 09/30 01:04 GMT by T : Yep -- both headline and post should have read "ms" (milliseconds) rather than "mS" (milli Siemens); thanks to all the alert readers.
So, this is a good improvement it seems, but shaves away 4.5 seconds or so out of maybe 30 sconds or over a minute for many people.
True, but this is still great.
The article says, "less than 200 milliseconds (mS) from power-up to application code startup." The thing that makes this great is that not every device is going to go through the entire *nix init sequence.
How about a device like a Linux embedded router, or something like that? Just a kernel running and that's all. Or how about a dashboard mp3 player that only needs to run one application?
This makes Linux much more like customized firmware, and there are plenty of places to use that.
Granted, this'll be great when it makes it to the desktop, too. =)
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Windows XP doesn't finish loading everything before you actually see the screen. Not sure about your system, but my XP get me to the welcome screen in maybe 15 second... the welcome screen then sits there for about another 5 seconds, then I finally get my login... after logging in it continue to load a lot of my device drivers which freeze the system up (not completely but make it slow to the point I can't use it) for about another 30 seconds. You could probably modify init to provide you with a login prompt before it starts running all the services... this way here you'd be able to login and use the system and the services would load up in the background while you were doing this. That's basically what XP does, realistically the time it takes me to get from loading to services start up in Linux is probably under 10 seconds... the services are what seem to take the most amount of time. They take about 20 seconds all around to load -- Depending on how many I have. My Server system boots up in about 15 seconds total from loading to login prompt... all services loaded.
...
... that when a company doesn't put its kernel changes out immediately, there's calls for hanging them for violating the GPL, but when a linux company optimizes boot-up routines in the kernel, nobody is asking when the patches are going to be making it into the mainline kernel?
from the looks of the article, FSMLabs has been basically profiling the kernel, looking for sticking points, and optimizing them.
why wouldn't at least some of this work be contributed back to the mainline kernel? it is modifications on a GPL'd kernel, after all.
For servers a big draw back is that if you have to patch the kernel (or update it) you must reboot, but if the acual reboot only takes less than a second, users might hardly notice the downtime (you could reboot and keep a 99.99% uptime).
Real men measure uptime as a percentage, not as an absolute value.
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