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Intel Slashes Computer Startup Times
An anonymous reader writes "At Intel's Developer Forum in Taiwan, Intel introduced a new Non-volatile caching technology called 'Robson'." The new Robson cache technology allows computers to start up almost immediately and load programs much faster. Intel declined to comment on the specifics of how the technology works only saying that 'More information will be revealed later'.
Hmm... I hope this doesnt require big changes to computer architecture...
I'm curious.
computerdude33's stuff: My blog of wonder.
The real reason more informatin will be revealed later is that their computers are still booting up!
This sig is neither interesting, nor humorous. Including meta-humor.
So are we going to all be expected to hibernate our Robson's now?
Why does this sound like a CowboyNeal joke to me?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I hope this is real and not vapor-ware. I've been waiting for instant start for 20 years.
Would we get a Robson Crusoe?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
FTFA: "It's up to the [equipment manufacturers] to decide how it will be implemented. My guess is that enterprise users will likely see it first," [Mooly Eden, VP and GM of Intel's mobile platform group] said.
S.Jobs: "Oh, yeah?"
Flash Robson to the Rescue!
you're booting too often
God Fucking Damnit
Stuff that will be revealed at a later date, if market conditions warrant its release.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
They're just trying to delay the release of 10 GHz chips.
For shame!
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
is that it captures a post boot image into flash and will flush it out if you cange something in the core os or hardware. The only thing I wqorry about is if you get some sort of corruption of the image without being reconfigured (like proxy poisoning). I'm assuming (if it uses such a method) it would be well checksummed for integrity.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The laptop with Robson also opened Adobe Reader in 0.4 seconds, while the other notebook required 5.4 seconds.
Presumably, the other notebook was running Intel's next generation CPU with sixteen cores.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Now that would save laptop batteries and also endless wait for program/windows startup time. But it would depend on the amount of flash memory installed then. So time = money, simple!
From article
"Robson is meant to be used with industry standard NAND flash memory of 64MB to 4GB capacities, Eden said. The laptop used in the demonstration contained 128MB NAND, he said."
ARE THERE ANY other instructions because I tried these and they didn't work.
. . .
But I never turn off my desktop (I do turn the CRTs off when I go to bed).
Sorry, it's an XP box and I do reboot now and then. Rarely have to cold boot it though.
The biggest application for this will probably be laptops. If the computer has 1GB of space for a page file and other stuff, then it will spend a lot less time accessing the hard drive. Less hard drive spinning means longer battery life.
Yes but does it work with Linux?
While cute, that's not entirely accurate. A well-maintained WinXP installation with antivirus installed still boots in the 30 second range on a P4 with a decent amount of RAM. It's the extra stuff that can really slow it down. (OpenOffice or MS Office, taskbar goodies, etc.)
Just like a really good Gentoo installation can boot up very quickly, but it can take awhile to go through the process if it isn't so well-optimized. Out-of-the-box on a dual boot P4, it's been my experience that WinXP boots faster than out-of-the-box Linux. (But I'm not enough of a linux guru to trim it down.) -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I've been hearing this touted for over a decade, now. "In the future, your PC will turn on as quickly as your TV!"
The thing is, I don't care how long my computer takes to boot. With decent sleep and hibernate modes, I don't need to boot more than a couple times a month anyway - and that's usually rebooting for software updates. (If you're wondering, this is on a PowerBook G4 laptop).
It takes my computer under a second to wake up from sleep mode. How much more "instant" does it need to get?
Now, those quick-loading programs, on the other hand, do sound appealing...
As much as I don't like Windows, I really shouldn't have to wait close to a minute for Ubuntu to get to the login screen, and then another 30ish seconds to get into GNOME when Windows 2000 does similar things in about 1/10th of the time on the same hardware.
If I were using Windows, I could start my computer in seconds.
And have it then crash in... seconds.
This doesnt seem to be about start up times at all (except from Hibernation). All it is, is a large HDD cache. This will do nothing to make PCs "Start up" Faster. It only has affect in the Article [aparrently] because the "slower" laptop had put its HDD to sleep.
I think PC Hardware and Software manufacturers really do need to work on the glacial boot times that PCs have. Unfortunately, this is only a solution to some of the minor problems, and not the main ones.
Move along... there is no sig here.
That's great, but what about Startup times for OSses? People need to make Windows and Linux (especially) to boot faster, because already, my Motherboard boots faster than my OS.
Student Research and Development
Ok, so maybe 1/10th is an exaggeration... but I haven't really used Windows 2000 in 3 or 4 weeks so it's hard to remember.
Linux User: Boo...ting? Oh...that thing I had to do when I first plugged it in. Gotcha.
n/t
Seriously. My 1ghz, 256mb RAM laptop can turn off, "caching" the data in about 4 seconds, and start up in about 8.
If that's not good enough, try my 2.93ghz/1g RAM gaming desktop - 7 seconds for a clean start up (no hibernate).
Besides, who actually shuts down their computers any more? I mean, with more people using bittorrent at night, or just turning off monitors, I don't really worry about start up times. Do you?
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
My guess is Apple knew about this technology, and it will first be used in Aptel Macs...
At least I can dream...
At any rate, the theory behind instant startup isn't too hard, it's just an engineering implementation.
All you do is make it so that, following shutdown procedures, the computer immediately switches to startup, except keeping track of the fact it was "shut down," not "restarted." When it finishes restarting, it writes the startup RAM state to disk, then turns itself off.
Upon being turned on, the computer just writes the stored RAM state back from the disk to RAM, and presto! It's just like starting up the computer, except really fast. At least, that was the theory. I've been sort of surprised not to see this implemented, it seems like everyone would like to see fast startups, but hardly anyone cares how long it takes to shut down (especially with soft power)- you're done with he computer anyway. I've heard that a lot of work goes into decreasing boot times for Windows and OSX. It seems like a lot less work to implement an "instant startup" plan, and then not have to care much if startup takes forever, than to carefully track, fiddle with, and optimize everything that happens during startup.
Of course, with this system, restarting after a crash would not be instant, it would take just as long as ever. So it might work to greater advantage on some operating systems than others, depending on why you usually restart.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I find the same thing. My kernel takes much longer (well, twice as long) as windows to boot up. This is mostly because I've compiled all my device drivers into the kernel, so everything gets detected during this stage. I suspect (but haven't bothered to find out) that if I had all the not-immediately-needed drivers as modules, and ran hotplug in the background rather then in the foreground, then everything would start up faster.
Maybe, anyway.
Sounds to me like they are using some kind of chip that has some form of "hibernation" mode built in, probably uses a flash rom/ram drive If that's the case, yes it will boot in a matter of seconds because it never really shutdown in the first place. Heck most of us can do this now. One more thing, Windows Vista claims to have this new-and-improved hibernation built in. Just something to think about....
From TFA:
"Chipmaker demonstrates 'Robson' flash memory to boost laptop startup speeds."
Mystery solved.
Actually I believe Windows is suppose to have that. Howver you need a very big HDD cache to do it.
I use Gentoo myself, and it's been my experience that boot time is ~20-30 seconds on my older Athlon Thunderbird, 10-20 seconds on my XP 2400+, and maybe 10-15 seconds more for GNOME and X to start. (If/when I do start them.) On the other hand, the last time I rebooted the system was 4 months ago, and that was when I physically moved it. At that rate, boot time is not a big deal.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
I have a Gentoo Linux laptop which, in the interest of portability and dual-booting, has to be booted frequently. I've not done anything fancy or funky with it, and don't know all that much about the scripts behind the boot sequence.
At home it has an 802.11 network connection; at work it has an Ethernet connection.
Now, when I'm using it at home it takes forever to go through the DHCP timeout on eth0, even though there's no link. Is there a simple way to either 1) tell it not to do a DHCP lookup unless it sees a link on eth0, or 2) tell it to go ahead with the boot process while waiting for the DHCP response?
Will it speed up the boot up time or also longing in into a desktop? Both take about the same time if you are using KDE.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
A very fast boot might make emulation less important. Need to run a Windows program? Boot into Windows in a few seconds and run it. Need a system optimized for gaming? You can have it in a few seconds. This could be very useful...
I'm wondering if this technique would work better with an image-based OS?
I wonder if Intel has created a Flash memory architecture that has massive internal parallelism on the read circuits of the flash RAM cells to feed a high-speed interface to RAM? It might read on the order of a thousand bits in parallel at slow speed (say 1 Mb/sec on each line) and reassemble in to output at high speed (1000 Mb/sec = 125 MB/sec). Seems feasible to me.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Ah, but once you get into GNOME, your system is up. Running. Finished. When you're in Windows, after you login you're still loading services. That's how Windows seems fast: it throws up a login screen before it's done loading. Linux doesn't do that.
word.
Umm... I'm not a Linux guru, but what you said doesn't really make much sense. Normally an out of the box linux kernel takes a long time to boot because it boots from an initrd. Also, any drivers compiled into the kernel will probably make things faster (assuming you only compile in what you use) because the computer doesn't have to sit around and load modules into memory. If you really have all your modules compiled in, try getting rid of your initrd and setting any modules that are getting loaded up with each boot into an autoload file, so the computer can just load them instead of trying to figure out which modules it needs. Like you said, some distributions make it easy to load the startup scripts in parallel -- this would probably also help you boot faster.
#include ".signature"
Debian has released advanced software technology that has rendered the need to reboot obsolete, threatening the adoption of Intel's recent vapor into the marketplace.
This isn't a load time problem. It's a load crap problem.
"Loading and verifying WebBuy.api" (does anyone ever use WebBuy, Adobe's DRM system for PDF documents?)
"Checking for updates" (Adobe might have changed the format of PDF again.)
Loading ad content for toolbar. (Sigh.)
And then all the crap that's being downloaded has to be scanned for viruses. It's all that junk that's the problem.
Of course, OpenOffice isn't all that great on launch time either. And no, loading it at boot time isn't the answer.
Who has 30 seconds to spend every time you need information. By the time a pc boots up and produces a browser pointed to the query I've entered, the question is often long gone and I'm on to something else. Or in the process of doing the 30 second boot I'm nagged to death about technical issues that have nothing to do with the information I seek until I'm unable to keep the question in my mind.
My $0.02
Greg.
"Sometimes you've got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight" Bruce C0ckburn
because "appliances" like macs can boot up a lot faster due to limited hardware support and stricter guidelines.
when it supports any arbitrary and millions of pieces of hardware like the x86 world, that would be something.
it's not a general purpose os, it is written specifically for mac hardware, down to the motherboard and auxiliary chips.
it cannot be done nearly as easily or well on the "pc" world.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Not having RTFA, I wonder if this is somehow related to MRAM? Linky
I know the ssrc (which I am sort of affiliated with) has been doing some research into it, and I think Intel may be involved with it...
Just a thought...
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
thats what we need, flash memory is getting cheaper, look at the nano, and jump drives, soon flash harddrives, Id be happy with a 40 gig flash HD !maybe even a 20 to just store WIN on
Here are a couple pics found on google:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www. system-cfg.com/photos/ibm_2011_1.jpg&imgrefurl=htt p://www.system-cfg.com/pages/ibm_2011.html&h=640&w =480&sz=37&tbnid=WHT00RkGPyEJ:&tbnh=135&tbnw=101&h l=en&start=10&prev=/images%3Fq%3DIBM%2Bps1%26svnum %3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DN
(The message to be displayed when the cache gets corrupt...)
*dodges tomatoes*
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
A well-maintained WinXP installation with antivirus installed still boots in the 30 second range on a P4 with a decent amount of RAM.
Wait, so you're saying that your XP install boots, logs in, and loads all the background stuff you use (AV, networking, bonzi, etc) in 30 seconds? I find that hard to believe.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
state clean, or else this will become yet another avenue for viruses and DRM to stubbornly cling to user's systems.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
My guess is that they just use a bank of EEPROMs to store a lot of the critical system routines and a EEPROM or two for their critical state information. They could refresh the status using idle cycles after the machine has started, but in general, those routines aren't going to change so much. (I think two EEPROMs for the state information because they could easily hold "last stable" and "almost ready" states.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
You can use something simmilar to this now... just use software suspend 2 and save to a filesystem on a flash card in your pcmcia slot.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Isn't there a lifespan on NAND flash memory in terms of read/write. I'm wondering how they have dealt with this. I realize the amount of read/writes required is quite high, but this application is far beyond your typical memory key or camera situation in terms of activity.
--- I've completed diagnosis of your problem and can classify it as a YOYO...You're On Your Own
I don't think I'm using an initrd.
I think (and I'm guessing, not a guru either, just some-one who guesses a lot) that Linux kernel doesn't perform any device driver init for a device until it is loaded, and it is not loaded until it is needed. By having the modules compiled in, they are all initilized during the startup, rather then on first use (such as when hotplug does hardware detection).
Re the modules being loaded on use: On a different machine, I just recently upgraded the kernel, and forgot to make modules_install (This machine loads almost everything as modules). It booted up right fast, but nothing much worked, naturally. Including the network card. Once I'd realised what I'd done, I did the make modules_install, then restarted the hotplug daemon. Voila, all the hardware went up (coldplug), and only thing remaining to do was restart the services that failed due to missing eth0.
I think this would be similar to how later versions of Windows "boot" faster, by moving some hardware detection off until the GUI is already loaded.
I'd try this when I got home, but by then I'll have forgotten about it again. I don't leave the machine in question on, it's my home desktop machine and sometimes goes days without being used (gasp!)
My XP laptop boots in a time that seems pefectly fine to me, dosen't bother me at all.
What bothers me is the login time. The *worst* thing being that even when the desktop and taskbar appear, there is still another 30 seconds before the machine is usable.
This seems like a big usability problem to me - I don't think it should be there until it is ready, otherwise the user gets very frustrated trying to click on a button that just wont play while the hard drive continues to thrash around.
Also, I think that 30 seconds is a bit lond to load a profile...
Actually (when booting to a gui in fedora core 4) my XP box boots hell of a lot faster then my Fedora box. THe XP is AMD 2.0 gHz, and the Fedora is Intel 2.8 gHz... so... I don't think your statement is entirely accurate. (Yes, I realize its a joke, I just wanna throw out the possibility that windows might be better for something, from a user who hates having to use windows). I realize I'm gonna get flamed for this.
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
Both computers are running a similar load of software at boot. The PC boots with Palm Desktop, Rainlender, and a web server (Abyss) while the Mac boots with Quicksilver and a web server (Apache). Other than that, everything else is pretty standard--audio drivers, video drivers, tablet drivers, and so on. Most of these things are present on both computers. The Mac is a month or two old, the PC hasn't been formatted in two years or so.
Everything timed at home with a stopwatch.
First up--the amount of time it takes from pushing the power button until you have a usable login screen.
Mac--139 seconds
PC--38 seconds
Next--the amount of time it takes from entering your password until you have an idle workspace (on Windows, this was when things stopped loading in the system tray, on OSX this was when the Finder menu appeared completely).
Mac--50 seconds
PC--9 seconds
So, complete boot time (plus whatever time it takes to enter a username and/or password)...
Mac--189 seconds
PC--47 seconds
Finally--the amount of time from the time you click "shutdown" until your computer is powered off.
Mac--53 seconds
PC--11 seconds
So, the time it takes to do a complete reboot...
Mac--242 seconds
PC--58 seconds
Instant-on would be fantastic if it could recover from crashes. There's nothing more frustrating than waiting three minutes for my laptop to boot.
Also this *innovation* is merely a box booting off flash card - no moving parts, no spin-up time and truly random access (disks are random cylinder, but serial track access). Essentially this would mean that we have a new form of OS on a motherboard which is probably locked down with security certs and all that.
I'm not dissing the implementation - but as far as the idea goes it's a simple solution for a simple problem. Thanks to your (only if you are American) USPTO, it is already patented as well (twice)And none of these are by intel - I suppose intel has already paid up
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Easy... I had my boot time down to around 26 seconds or so at one point on my gaming machine... It isn't any more because I have WAY too much software installed, but a sub 30 sec boot time is easy...
No you're just plain wrong.
Windows boots faster and gets to a usable desktop faster than Linux. Period.
I use both Linux and Windows, mostly Linux though. Windows plain boots quicker.
I wish it weren't true, but unfortunately it is. There is some work being done to speed things up, loading services in parallel instead of one after another. I believe Suse is the first major distro to implement this. I have Suse installed for testing and it boots much quicker than my normal distro kubuntu.
Once again, I'm most definitely not a Windows fanboy, I'm just stating the facts.
And "quick boot" won't help. The reason you are booting too often is because the OS you use is buggy and unstable, probably the one with an "insane" goal of 30 days uptime that currently has to be booted daily.
You also suffer from a single screen GUI, so you can't easily work on more than one thing at a time.
My laptop six year old laptop stays up longer than that. I take it down to get around buggy bios which sometimes won't work the vga out when I need to give a presentation. It goes to sleep when I close the lid and it wakes up when I open it, sometimes days later. My work is where I left it, on one of eighteen Enlightenment virtual desktops.
What's Intel got to match what I've already got? A copy of XP in the BIOS? No thanks, Intel, you can keep the next generation of boot pain to yourself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I can't speak to the Windows comparison, but on my side of the fence even though OS X wins points for its wake-from-sleep implementation, I've never experienced "lightning-fast" boots on my PowerBooks. There's room for improvement there. (And if the Intel PR is to be taken at face value, other benefits attach for laptop users through adoption of Robson.)
The trailing remark meant more that Robson -- if it does provide tangible benefits to users -- offers Apple an opportunity to exploit by taking the lead in implementing Intel tech and fueling its marketplace acceptance ahead of Intel's other customers. Instead of waiting for something like this to filter down from the enterprise level to consumers, Apple might now be in a position to bring it to consumers (or "prosumers") ahead of schedule, so to speak.
Or not. Robson cache technology could always turn out to be a bust on any number of fronts.
Will we be seeing Ubuntu booting up in a few seconds, instead of a minute? I can only hope.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
Yes, this is "hibernate".
However, it's nowhere near instantaneous. Consider that now laptops can easily have 1GB ram, or more. Next consider that laptop harddrives can do aproximately 20MB/s on linear reads. That's 50 seconds to restore the ram image. This doesn't include time Windows needs to detect and initialise all chips and periferals to get to the ram image.
Does 50+ seconds sound instantaneous to you?
Sometime, try a plain install of Windows, no SP2, no patches, not word, quicklaunchers, toolbars, etc. I said it was a games machine, and I meant it. I wouldn't take it online due to no anti-virus/firewall, but it works great for LAN games.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
to some degree it is.
everything has its ups and downs, pros and cons.
i prefer buying my computer components piecemeal. i can upgrade my computer every 2 years to a top of the line x86 system for $600. if i were to go to a mac, i'd have to chuck my whole system and buy a brand new one. obviously i can't afford to spend 2500 bucks every 2 years, i'm not that rich. and apple won't sell just the motherboards and cpus. hell, they even won't let you install the software (macosx) on anything other than what they tell you you can (not that EULAs are binding or anything).
i've been spoiled by cheap computers. i cannot go back to the 90's and buy a whole new computer every couple of years.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I think this could be most interesting with regard to dual boots - especially with regard to Mactels with Windows onboard. You can switch operating systems without rebooting, or without going through all the loading and calculation involved with rebooting. Virtual PC has a "Save PC state on shutdown" option which already does this. When you quit virtual PC, everything its doing is simply stored, and recalled very fast when you reopen this. Implementing this for x operating systems on your Mactel can't be impossible. Each OS stores itself and then restores the one you want before terminating itself - you could switch from Linux to OS-X to XP in as little as 20 seconds each change!
Didn't RISCOS/Acorn do this way back when? Doesn't LinuxBIOS aim to do this?
Loadable modules vs. in-kernel drivers won't make much of a speed difference to most people on most PCs.
However, some drivers do take much longer to initialize than others (esp. those that load data into their respective hardware at startup or that probe many sub-devices).
I sell servers with RAID controllers that take longer to scan at BIOS POST time than the kernel takes to boot. We don't worry about boot times though; you shouldn't be using that "power" button for a year or two.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I don't know why Intel is working so hard to try to make Microsoft look good. Improvements to hardware can't fix shitty software.
Because when Microsoft looks good Intel Looks good. Most people do not know the difference between the OS and the hardware. When the OS is slow they get new hardware, figuring their computer is just old and slow. While in the short term this may sound good but what will probably happen people will be frustrated with the intel system (Figuring it is a peace of junk) and Go with AMD or what ever else. And by chance they may go with a PC manufacture that doesn't pre-load the computer crap so they get a computer that seems extremely fast so people my not go with Intel again.
Windows is even more embarassingly beaten when you compare OS X Server with Windows 2000 or 2003 Server. Those fuckers take FOREVER to reboot.
This again may point to the hardware. A lot of time when I see a window server boot a bulk of the time is before it gets to the OS Level it is just probing for SCSI devices or doing a detailed check on all the ram (The issues TFA is saying it improved) If you want to see slow take a look at a Sun Enterprise system, they can take 5 minutes before they show you anything on the screen. The reason for this slowness is the fact that because these systems should go down often they need a full check on the hardware to make sure nothing is wrong after month/years of uptime.
Also the issue with Windows vs. OSX Server is that Windows can run on Any Box so it needs to check for as many possibilities as possible. While OSX knows what to do when it asks for the hardware configuration and the hardware responds XServe G5 32gb RAM. You can fault windows on a lot of thing, But I give them credit for being able to run on all the crap it does.
IME, OS X boot times beat the living shit out of Windows boot times. I've seen years-old, sub-1GHz G4s boot faster than home-built (i.e. lacking all the extra, cycle-eating horseshit programs that hobble your average Dell or HP PC) 2.0+GHz Wintel boxes with fresh installs of XP.
I don't know I have seen XP having a rather snappy boot up time, it is about on par with OS X. The only real difference is XP tends to still boot after the start button appears, allowing you to access the interface. While OS X takes a little longer in the Splash screen.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Ah, that's the thing I was missing to make it clear, when I moved the USB modules into the kernel image the bootup took longer.
And anything worth putting a RAID controller in to should probably be on all the time, yeah. If it's not, is it really worth a RAID controller? But I do know about the long scan times, a person I know insists on having extra drives and between the on-mobo SATA and the add-in IDE expansion card, that machine takes forever to boot. (The expansion IDE card get's ID'd as a RAID card by the BIOS (based on it's PCI ID I assume).)
forget adobe reader, use foxit pdf reader, much much smaller.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Cheaper than 4GB of flash, faster. No need for a swap file if you have 4 fricking gigs.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11041
Install Adobe Reader 6
From the Start->Run windows menu, Open the "x:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader" folder, where x is the right drive letter.
Find the plug_ins folder and rename it plug_ins_disabled
Create a new folder named plug_ins
Copy the following files from "plug_ins_disabled" to "plug_ins": EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api
Of course this will limit the functionality to viewing non-encrypted pdf files, but that's exactly what I want Acrobat ^B^B^B^B^B Adobe Reader for, 99.9% of the time. You might want to experiment leaving some of the fat in, I mean,
With the files listed, you get half the load time on low-end systems, and a 2-sec load time on high-end ones. Still, you might want to prefer using Acrobat Reader 4.05 on old systems, since it loads in just seven seconds instead of 20.
cpeterso
Not related to this on any other post, but I have to post this. Is this only me or anybody else also thinks that 80% of slashdot articles are picked-up from news.com.com Ofcourse the kind of comments one can find here make then worth reading again on slashdot. I actually read news.com and then wait for the article to appear on slashdot.
I don't know why Intel is working so hard to try to make Microsoft look good. Improvements to hardware can't fix shitty software.
When Windows 2000 came out, Intel owners were immediately blessed with a conflict-free APIC controller. Meanwhile AMD users were punching their nuts over the "IRQ 9 syndrome". That sort of thing makes Intel look good.
> faster than home-built (i.e. lacking all the extra, cycle-eating horseshit programs that hobble your average Dell or HP PC)
There's 0 evidence that Dell/HP boots slower than home-built. If anything their bios flips through much faster than generic.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I think your parent meant that the Dell and HP boxes boot slower because of all the crap that is set to startup with Windows when these machines are shipped. From my experience, the Dell and HP machines boot slower than a minimal install on a home-built machine. This is pretty obvious, because there are fewer programs to start. So, its not so much that its from Dell or HP, just that they put a lot of crap on those things that has to boot up. I always recommend wiping these things clean and installing Windows fresh...solves this whole issue.
Suspend to a permanent and dedicated NAND drive. Forget suspending to harddrive, etc. Intel will be pushing NAND flash tech soon, I'll bet you!
This just sounds like another take on the "suspend to disk" or "hibernate" features that have been in Windows (and probably Mac for all I know) for the better part of a decade by now. I suspect the only difference is that they're using high-speed non-volatile RAM to do it faster than you could with a hard drive on a computer with 512MB to 1GB of system RAM. Not all that exciting, basically.
Of course, only laptop users really use such features. Even so, my desktop boots up quite quickly - the longest single delay by far is due to my silly ITE second IDE controller, which takes 10-15 seconds to scan its drive(s).
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
My best guess is that the non-volatile memory technology is polymer based. Polymer memory has extremely high read/write throughupt.
Having a superfast disk media will not improve boot times unfortunately. There are all ready windows benchmarks of booting directly from battery-backed RAM, and the results were not much better than using a standard hard drive.
because "appliances" like macs can boot up a lot faster due to limited hardware support and stricter guidelines. when it supports any arbitrary and millions of pieces of hardware like the x86 world, that would be something. it's not a general purpose os, it is written specifically for mac hardware, down to the motherboard and auxiliary chips. it cannot be done nearly as easily or well on the "pc" world.
What the crack are you smoking? There's nothing magical about Macs or PCs that makes booting any different, other than technology chosen for implementation. You can install any hardware you want on a Mac if you can get (or write) a driver or kernel extension for it. It's just as "general-purpose" in architecture as Windows -- I mean, you can download, compile and install the basic OS on your i386 clone hardware for free!
Yeah, the difference between supporting 5,000 HDD controllers or 50 HDD controllers WOULD make a big difference in boot times if the computer was probing and identifying hardware by going through that list from scratch on every boot, but that's not how it works.
The reasons Mac hardware starts faster is because it actually uses modern hardware configuration techniques, rather than relying on decades-old BIOS technologies. Why is Windows still virtualizing a limited number of hardware interrupts? Intel had the technology to get rid of them over a decade ago, but the PC still goes through this whole elaborate song and dance between the BIOS and the OS every time the system boots. And it goes through a painfully outdated "hunt-and-peck" style hard disk boot process (and more virtualization to be able to access large drives, and more virtualization on the disk itself to make up for deficiencies in the partitioning capabilities of drives from 1983).
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Reboot time should be pretty much immaterial, since one should only reboot rarely anyway due to suspend and hibernate functions... but in the real world every laptop I've had (Linux or Windows) has had to be rebooted occasionally because of flakiness coming out of suspend/hibernate. Wireless card goes fritzy, explorer crashes, whatever. Maybe they could concentrate on getting the OS to behave before they worry about boot times...
I guess I'm most familiar with commercial Dell/HP systems, where there really isn't that much crap loaded. Maybe realplayer or something, but most people install that sort of thing anyway. Of course, the parent is full of shit because a stock XP Dell will boot the desktop very very quickly.
For kicks, I turned on the TCPA (DRM) chip on my ThinkPad -- that added at least 30 seconds to boot time and was disabled very soon afterwards. What a hunk of crap.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
If your machine isn't loaded with a bunch of spyware and other nonsense, then yes xp machines boot faster than most any linux distro out there. Anyone denying this has his head stuck up his ass.
That's only one of the many things that Windows does to boot quicker. There's even a background deamon that optimizes drive layout for quick booting during idle times.
It's pure sour grapes. An XP desktop is not hindered because something is starting in the background. Linux doesn't do this stuff because the people who put money into development are looking at the server market.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I'm wondering just how many arbitrary combinations of the millions of devices out there you actually have in your home computer. And out of those millions of arbitrary combinations, how many actually work? Sit back down.
The image is a dream, the beauty is real. Can you see the difference?
My fuggin PDA starts in like 1 second. I just push the button and there it is. Of course, it stores everything in RAM so go figure. The browser is Netfront 3 so I have tabs and all that shit. When I do an actual reboot it takes like 30 seconds but that happens like, what, once a month? If my shit PDA can do this shit with Windows Mobile on it, my PC should be able to. And don't tell me about how a PDA is like a fuggin handheld TRS 80, cause it isn't. It can do practically everything a real computer can do short of play 3d games. I even have Quake 1 on it and it plays about as good as a Pentium 100. And a Pentium 100 takes a fuggin long ass time to load. Anyway, bye.
compatibility?
that's why you can't do cool new things on x86 pc's... you'd risk losing one of the prime reasons to use x86: compatibility.
hell, motherboards still come with floppy connectors. why? because some ancient or niche programs still require a floppy to use. winxp still only accepts drivers for hd's on a floppy only.
and frankly, the bios or initialization hardware shouldn't be doing much more than just probing the hardware and passing control to an OS. anything more and you risk DRM like abilities... minimalism is truly the best way to go. extensible minimalism... if that's not a contradiction.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
This page http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Initng has instructions on using it with Gentoo. Very cool project, worth checking out.
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!
My Gentoo Box boots in 13 seconds. Maybe 5 seconds to fluxbox, including loging in and "startx". Not a big deal, and I restart a whole once or twice a week. But that's because I'm moving hard disks around and only have one firewire case. When I do restart, I don't want to have remnants from last time, I want to start over. I thought that was the point of restarting. I for one am not going to rush out to buy anything to cut ten seconds off my boot time anytime soon. My two cents, flame me or mod me down for being a dumbass, I don't particularly care. Oh, and I didn't bother to RTFA. Bite me.
:)
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice / 2G / 1.8T over 8 disks... mostly anime.
You complain about the zoom extending. Uhu, have you looked at compact multi-element zoom designs? 12 or more elements, many or even most of which geared independantly is not uncommon. The longer the zoom - comsumer guys want optical 10 times zooms, which would be unheard of in a professional lens for many other considerations (predominantly aperture speed and distortion characteristics) and that means even more complicated designs, even allowing small lenses are easier and simpler to design. Now try shifting all those elements _accurately_ with a tiny low voltage low torque servo (see why it's low torque here - too fe2w turns possible in such a small space to get a focus throw long enough to try to do this quickly and accurately and repeatably*). This is why my piezo-wave-effect ring-motor driven Nikkor zoom is several times more expensive of itself than almost any digicam.
Got the idea?
To the above poster - i sure hope there's not much calibration going on when i boot my Nikon. Unless it's to compensate for working temperature effects, if i've spent time and effort having a lens tuned to how i like it (yes this doesn't just happen, it's common) i want it to be left alone at that spec. Now that even modest digicams such as the Fuji F10/11 boot instantly and respond extremely quickly, there's simply no excuse for slow electronics and (electronic) shutter save at the real budget segment.
* even some (sadly many) professional photogs insist on continuing the myth that because the lens / sensor is small, everything remains sharp because the DOF (depth of field) is greater in those conditions. Er, DOF is a psychological effect which is a function of the print enlargement factor, print size, viewing distance and airy dic resolving limit - so the assumption is not true at equivalent apertures, hence the need even in very small "format" cameras to _still_ focus accurately, in OP's case, sadly, slowly too. The effect observed is anecdotally true however at small print sizes like 6" by 4".
A BIG Lie. I use an iBook G4 with 768 MB RAm and 1.33 GHz Processor, and it still takes longer than my Windows XP Home Edition running on 1.86 Ghz Athlon with 512 MB RAM by (1,300 milliseconds).
Don't just crow about Mac or diss Windows if you are not a user of any of them.
Slashdot is NOT a forum where you look cool because you have just kicked Bill gates or dissed Windows.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Most laptops have a standby that does something useful - as a result, my laptop (which is used for taking notes in classes) usually goes ten to fifteen days without a reboot. I just stick it into standby mode whenever i'm not using it.
Instead of just dumping the contents of the whole RAM to disk, it will only deal with the part of RAM that is actually allocated (not the part that is used as HD cache). For the actual memory that has been allocated, everything that can be paged to swap will be paged to the swap file. Due to the swapping mechanism, a great deal of the memory in use is probably already in the swap file. All the other bits are stored in a hibernation file.
When booting, all that has to be done is dump the contents of the hibernation file to RAM (which is probably way smaller than the actual size of the RAM). From that point on, the OS starts running again and pages the stuff you actually need back out of swap (a much more gradual process than dumping back a snapshot of the full RAM contents).
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Isn't this (from the users' point of view) almost the same thing as software suspend? I reboot/power off my Mac only when a new security update comes out, the sleep/wake up is almost instant. On Windows or Linux the software suspend is not as quick, but seems fast enough for me.
Maybe some server machines could make use of the quick boot... but then again, the article says the machine does the starting procedure in advance, before it shuts down, so that there are no savings in the reboot/start again cycle--just the majority of the work is shifted to the "shutdown" phase?
There's 0 evidence that Dell/HP boots slower than home-built. If anything their bios flips through much faster than generic.
I think the poster was referring to the fact that a lot of pre-built computers are loaded with twenty three zillion TSRs, 'helper' programs, and pre-installed AOL trial software. While you probably are correct about the actual bios settings being nicely pre-optimized, you seem to lose that extra boost as the computer loads 3.5 gigs of 'free' extra crap that compaq/hp/gateway was kind enough to install on the system.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Real digital cameras (read "not $200 consumer HP shit") don't have that issue. Not trying to flame you or anything, but the tech is there.
:)
Sadly only at a $5,000 entry price. (Canon 1D and Nikon D2 series cameras as new with suitable lenses). Related to my other post, there is quite a cost associated with QA which is hard to overcome, though i expect the real obstacle is market segmentation and tax deductability for users such as myself. Imaging sensors need scale economies to improve (justify R&D and fab costs), and very good sensors are available in modest cameras. So there has to be something in the "pro" models to justify the cost leap, and it's not always the sensor. For this reason many pros using e.g. a Nikon D2x (a $4,000 body, no lens) also tote and do great work with a D70, for 20% of the price. But build quality, AF accuracy, AF speed, ruggedness and handling are all things pro photogs are habitually happy to pay big bucks for. It helps them get the shots they want more quickly, and better designs help get the gear out of the way when shooting. Honestly, the D2X is for me the easiest cam i've ever used, though i bet it would frighten a average user, and, natch, it is not a good performer when left on "auto-everything" mode. If you want great out of the box pictures _with little or no user input_, there are tons of great digicams out there that will far better suit you and, honestly, deliver more consistently pictures you enjoy.
Anyway, nothing starts up faster or delivers pictures faster than a manual focus manual metering film camera set to "sunny 16" rule
Ok, but if you notice what they are basically doing to do startup and shutdown is using non-volative NAND as a small partition for Program Loading AND Suspend mode. Keep in mind, read and write times for these devices are 3 orders of magnitude less than hard drives AND your search times go down to 0.
For those arguing about boot times between Gentoo and WinXP this basically DOES NOT APPLY. We're looking at an added hardware functionality that if the OS supports, it *will* be faster *no matter what*.
(minus comparisons to booting from a NAND-based SATA / Fiber-Channel interface) [ bitmicro.com ]
If you are curious about having this technology now, contact BitMicro and buy yourself a 2 Gig NAND based solid state miltary grade hard drive. It'll run a little under a grand, and you will know what a difference between 3 orders of magnitude read and write time does to any OS level booting. ( ms to ns )
If you are curious, I have seen this and done this myself. This is not exactly new hardware, but Intel is doing great marketing if they can produce an OS mod to properly utilize it. Most probably it becomes an AppLoader that forces the application to a separate partition rather than get M$ on the bandwagon. If my experience with IBM software has told me anything, you're expecting to find a low-level application which will try to take *over* suspend and shutdown functionality and probably break all over the place with WinXP patches.
you'd risk losing one of the prime reasons to use x86: compatibility. hell, motherboards still come with floppy connectors. why? because some ancient or niche programs still require a floppy to use. winxp still only accepts drivers for hd's on a floppy only.
Compatability is an illusion -- you can't install WinXP on a 16-bit processor, much less an 8-bit one. So why are the hardware limitations of XP systems still being driven by compatibility with 8-bit processors?
You actually point out a key difference in why the boot time is so screwed up on the PC. An ancient floppy connector and controller on the motherboard? Why? You can buy a $29.99 USB floppy drive and it will work perfectly on any modern PC motherboard. That technology is 10 years old. I mean, if you really want a 720k floppy drive hooked up, there's nothing in the MacOS hardware or software architecture that will stop you, Apple just recognizes that it's a waste of time to devote any of their own engineering effort or motherboard space to an obsolete technology. But if you install Darwin on an i386 system, it will quite happily find your 1987-era floppy and boot from it.
and frankly, the bios or initialization hardware shouldn't be doing much more than just probing the hardware and passing control to an OS
That's exactly what the Mac does, and exactly what the PC doesn't do. The PC hardware is still based around the 1980s notion that you would have certain predictable and limited peices of hardware that meet certain outdated specifications and the BIOS would control them all. We've been building workarounds for that assumption and it's arbitrary limitations (640k of memory? Boot past a certain cylinder on the hard drive?) ever since.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Unless i'm downloading something or an application needs to be left running overnight or longer, I shut down both my work and home machines. I also don't see the problem in them starting up either. Geee a minute at MAX. Why do you leave your computers on? Why is it that you all are trying to sound cool that you leave your computers on for months at a time? I just don't get it....
Software = Flesh
Hardware = Machine
I for one salute our new, faster booting Cyborg Overlords.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Of course, when I was saying that fast startups are nothing new, I missed the obvious example of one of the best-selling computers of all time. My Commodore 64 was done starting up by about the time I'd finished flipping the switch and moved my eyes to the screen.
Not that I'd recommend a programming-language cum OS stored in ROM for a modern computer, but it sure loaded fast.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I don't think your scheme works, really. What if I have 4 operating systems to choose from at boot time? That basically reduces the possible caching to POST + boot menu. The POST is something I might want to run anyway (I've seen computers actually fail during the POST), and the boot menu takes less than a second to load.
Of course, what you could do is boot each operating system, then dump a memory image, and have the boot menu select from among these memory images. You'd still have to do some hardware initialization next to loading the memory image, but you could save the time it normally takes to, say, start services and your desktop environment. This even shouldn't be too hard to implement in software.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I remember this hack of sectors boot of the 5-1/4 floppy discs in Apple IIe, that permit the boot in less than 3 seconds. First used near 1985, it was widely used after with some softs that helps newbies to do fast boots with their own disks. Once again, Intel is twenty years late in regard of Apple... I must admit that Microsoft invented the "fast blue screen" before Apple but haven't yet patented it ;-p
I think the point is that you can get an internal floppy drive for $8, why pay $29.99 + tax for ancient hardware you can get cheap if your board supports it. If it doesn't, you can go the Apple route and pay high prices for the "newer" version that might have "super snappy" technology.
-]Phreak Out[-
Pro-tip.
Never turn your powerbook off.
You mean that it takes 1.3 seconds for your Athlon to boot? Hmmmmm ... sounds pretty weird to me, even if it's Home Edition. The standard bootup process takes longer even if there is no OS bootup time.
OS X and Linux both have long boot times compared to XP, but the wake-from-sleep in OS X is generally faster than XP's offering (even if it's really sort of a trick). And yeah, I'm an active user of both XP and OS X.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of Robsons, you insensitive clod!
....my BBC micro did way back in the '80s!
Let me guess - i.e. the memory + harddrive pagefile survive a hibernate and therefore don't need to be restored. Therefore the "improved load times" come about because if the thing was loaded into memory before the hibernation, the data including any cached DLLs will still be there afterwards.
10.4 improved the BootCache performance. Speedcheck, beige G3 292mhz 448M ram, disks don't ask ;-)
...
Startup - 36sec
Login - 17sec
Shutdown - 15sec
When I read TFA my first reaction was, another Apple idea stolen. But then I saw the Flash description, and it's another Apple idea stolen, turned inside out, and embellished so Apple would never want it back.
Then of course there's those lovely old machines with the ROM based OS, Atari ST1040, some models of Acorn,
Ever notice how lightbulbs tend to break when you're turning them on? - It's because of the power surge, which tends to be tough on electronics, and the same thing still holds true for most electric appliances. I just leave my computers on 24/7, and have never had to replace broken components. If people are going to develop the habit of turning on and off their computers mutiple times per day, then we'll start to see more equipment failures.
..........FULL STOP.
WTF is Ubuntu spending all that time on? After I went through the startup scripts on my old 600 MHz SuSE box, removing every unnecessary sleep, I got the boot time (excluding BIOS and X) down to 13 seconds. 2-3 seconds for X.
Unfortunately my ISP decided to change me over to DHCP, even though I ordered fixed IP, and their DHCP server takes up to five seconds, which completely ruins my fast boot-up times (and getting a new 2.4 GHz computer didn't help with that, DHCP is 95% waiting for the replies from the server).
Anyone who has any software from Adobe or Sun on their machine. "Oh, adobe has changed acrobat this week again. Now it wants to download, install itself and reboot". God knows why a pdf reader requires a reboot to be upgraded.
Is this any different than using something like a CF card as a drive? That boots and loads programs much faster too, uses very little space, and is highly energy effecient. At least for CF drives all you need is a CF card and a module that lets the card be loaded as an IDE drive which typically costs about $20.
If it's the same then it's great for storing files that are rarely written but not great for storing often rewritten files *such as a temp dir or swap mem) because the flash memory wears out fairly often. (Turning off things like recording last access time of files helps a lot.) Maybe use a removable usb drive for storing your documents? Still uses flash memory but that way your OS and apps don't die if your documents do and vice versa. Net-stored documents would be an idea too.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Yes but does it work with Linux?
After all, we have only a vague idea of how this thing works. It could well require some kind of OS support.
Now obviously we don't know the answer to that until Intel decides to squirt out another press release at some point in the future. But in the mean time there may be some people on Slashdot who have some specialist knowledge of this type of thing. Maybe they will join the discussion and provide some insightful opinions or even some informative answers.
No we did not implement booting puppy linux from a flash disk. That has never been done before. Especially it is untested from a intel motherboard.
Also we never invented "On-Now" for windows 98.
-- ministry of disinformation.
This has to be the second or third time I've seen this headline. For computers with real OS's, who needs to shorten the reboot time? Is this really a problem? The machine I'm on hasn't been powered off in about four years...
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
any well configured Windows box will have as much uptime as you can shake a stick at.
i've had NT4 workstations that have been up for months on end: they only get booted when a hotfix requires it. i've had 2000 machines that have been on, undisturbed, for nigh on a year.
my home XP box (which has *all* sorts of crap installed on it: just not buggy crap) is typically never turned off, bar the hotfixes/patches that require a reboot.
i'd expect mac OSX to be no different, and linux too: if your system is setup right, it will stay up for as long as you like.
i really don't see the issue here.
Up to about 1996 my regular computer was one that booted virtually instantaniously. It's just that it didn't run Windows, Mac OS or Linux. RISC OS (as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) was/is in ROM/FLASH and was there the moment the machine started. I held off moving over to a PC/Linux basically because of boot times. Admittedly with linux you just leave the machine on so it's not an issue but Windows was/is a real pain.
read and write times for these devices are 3 orders of magnitude less than hard drives AND your search times go down to 0.
Why do people write things like this without quoting a reference for the figures?
NAND flash isn't that fast, especially for write.
E.g.
OneNand (the fastest sort)
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/Fla
108MB/sec read
8.2MB/sec write
Normal NAND is much worse.
I got 60MB/sec write speeds on a SATA disk at the start. Probably the average is around
50MB/sec.
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050927/hd_r
So the Flash is 2x faster on a read, but 6x slower on a write.
Seek times BTW, are not zero on a flash disk. When you read the disk, there is a look up
table to convert logical sector numbers to physical addresses. Usually, this is like a
cache, so seeking to the end of the disk will cause the cache to miss and get refilled.
Cache refills require a lot of reads from the flash, so there is a penalty to seeking,
even though nothing moves physically.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Flash is definatly going down in price. I remember seening here that Samsing got fined £500 million for trying to control the market prices.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Well LinuxBIOS has been getting boot up times in the 3 second range for a while. Nothing new move on. http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/Main_Page
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Linux freaks:
Now we dont have to care so much about windows restarts for updates
Windows freaks:
Now linux users can change kernels quicker.
Dual booters:
We're happy.
Why UNIX?
When your computer crashes, we enable you to boot almost immediately. It's so fast, it's almost like no crashing at all!
With Intel Inside, you can.
Of course you can ask.
The 18 deskstops are actually three virtual desktops with six screens each. Enlightenment gives them each a pager and all share an icon box. The icon box works like a taskbar except it makes thumbnails instead of crappy little icons. The pager also makes thumbails, so you can see your whole desktop at a glance by looking at all the pagers.
When I get a new task, I open a new six panel desktop. I start in the middle top panel and drag things to other screens as needed. When I don't finish a task, I just leave it there and come back to it when I have the time or inspiration.
A typical task is a homework project. For instance, I'll edit and compile source code with kate and a konsole in one screen, make graphs with the result under that screen, do html or pdf write up in another and co-ordinate it all with a konqueror file browser in the middle top screen. That leaves me with three virtual screens for other tasks, like symbolic math with xmaxima, spell checking with kdict, or what have you. I usually have two or three homework projects going at once. Other tasks include customer billing, email, contact management and browsing.
The multiple desktop of Enlightenment is light years ahead of Microsoft's crappy single screen GUI taskbar approach. Grouped icons are a small step in the right direction for them and Nvidia has some multi desk software, but it's painfully slow and bloated. Having to boot daily eliminates place keeping and most of the advantages above. My laptop is a 233 MHz PII. Faster laptops, of course, work better but mine is usable. The M$ solution, where you buy more monitors and a PII or better, just makes me laugh.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Now I'm going to have to change all my programs to be much more bloated and resource-wasteful than before so that I can balance them against this new technology!
Why oh why is it that my dual opteron 242 w/ 1gb ram workstation with a completely fresh install of winxp pro with nothing yet installed takes about 10 minutes to boot up. I can reinstall numerous times to no avail. But fedora core runs fine.
on a side note I cant seem to get gentoo to run with any stability, it crashes compiling the bootstrap or windowmanager...
If anyone has some tips im all ears!
I'm sorry your parody of the SlashMeme "...but does it run Linux?" was moderated off-topic. Such is the luck of the draw with moderation. Better luck next time, when you get to moderate Soviet Russians. Or something.
Of course, the parent is full of shit because a stock XP Dell will boot the desktop very very quickly.
Uh huh, and then there's another maddening 30-60 seconds when you've got a desktop with icons on it but the computer is still thrashing the drive and plunking icons into the systray, while completely ignoring you-- and then when it's finally ready to accept input from you, 6 instances of what you were trying to launch opens up. Yeah, that's some nice multitasking. BTW, this is on a home built Athlon XP 2600 with a shitload of RAM.
If you're using a MS Windows machine and leaving it on 24/7, you're a moron... Whether it requires rebooting (because of MS Windows) or not, what are you using it for that it needs to be on all the time?
Nothing critical I hope.
I remember cases in NT where a reboot would no flush out a dll, we had to shutdown completely for the OS to puick up a new version of a dll. Will this caching have the same effect, e.g. if there is corrupted code loaded will it ever be flushed?
On the upside it may force people to write better software, requiring fewer reboots.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Too bad they're moving to EFI which takes about 3 minutes to boot on current Itanium implementations as is. With the path they're taking, this really won't help.
In light of Apple's fast approaching ppc to intel switch, maybe this isn't a case of intel being late, but intel progressing at the behest of Apple. Steve Jobs has made a big deal about fast boot times and instant wake from sleep. Even if steve didnt push intel to develop this, it's nearly certain that he will want to incorporate it into future powermacs/powerbooks.
Read this story about a 2Gb RAM disk. I think this was tom's hardware site. They installed WinXP on it, and got a speedup of only a few seconds I believe (31 vs 35s). Apparently, there are a lot of initialization routines that run and apart from getting a super fast CPU and memory, it's not really the disk speed that's holding the boot times back by that much.
x .html
RTFA here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050907/inde
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
How's this any different from Gigabyte's iRAM?
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
So there'll have to be an option for a deep reboot which clears and recreates the persistant memory after it gets corrupted. MS will then choose to save themselves some effort by forcing the user to do a deep reboot whenever new software is installed. Since most PCs have several new pieces of malware installed during each on-line session, reboots will be the same as always.
My kernel takes a little while to boot, with 6 drives in my PC (2 SATA, 4 IDE) to initialize on 2(3) controllers and other fun hardware.
That said, my bootup after that is near instant since I long ago moved away from the init.d style startup toward a daemontools parallel startup system.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
If you figure that the Flash will survive up to 100,000 write cycles, then if you rewrite it ten times a day, it'll last 27 years. I doubt your boot configuration will change that often. And 100,000 cycles is a lot lower than the "rated" lifetime of modern Flash, not to mention that the "actual" lifetime can be a lot longer with appropriate load-leveling and error recovery.
Have you considered Ritalin?
Yeah but in two years, your Mac will not only still be useful, it will still be worth a good amount of money (just loo at ebay). IOW, you won't be replacing it anytime soon (witness how many people still use G3s and have no problems with it). Your PC won't. If you're upgrading every two years... well, why? It makes little to no sense anymore, unless you a) are a gamer b) or working with heavy duty media, and by heavy duty, I mean 100 minute length HD quality stuff (I've seen plenty of standard 100 minute stuff composed/edited on G4s and Athlon XPs).
Not even developers buy heavy duty hardware anymore for personal use. Most coders I associate with have a very specific compiling machine or server (or cluster of servers) and they code on boxes they haven't upgraded in forever.
So.. what about the people still using old Intel processors? I want a refund! Damn them and their new-technology-developing-ly-ness.
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
There are a couple of things wrong here:
.24kWh a day. Your magical 10w computer is worse than driving my car five miles in just 4.7/.24 = 19.6 days.
1. Your computer's waste heat is only useful when you're heating your house. It has the opposite effect when you're running the AC. Where you live will greatly affect how this balances out.
2. A gallon of gasoline contains about 33 kWh of energy. If I drive my car a couple of miles (we'll say 5, to be generous) I use 1/7 of a gallon of gasoline. 33/7 is about 4.7kWh. If your computer uses a continuous 10 watts while it is on, you use
You'll also note that this calculation is *extremely* weighted against the car-- the car's energy usage is calculated including conversion loss, while the PC is measured at the outlet ignoring generation and transmission losses, I've rounded a "few" miles up to 5 miles, and I've assumed your computer only uses 10 watts. If I use a more reasonable 150w average for your PC, you would save the equivalent of five miles of driving every 1.3 days your computer was off.
I'm a tree-hugging, bike-commuting, CFL lights and efficient appliances enviro-nut-- but you sir, aren't helping matters with hyperbole and exaggeration. Be honest, and let the real numbers speak for themselves. Telling people "they've done worse for nature" because they turn their computer off is silly AND false. You can't expect everyone to do everything right-- but every choice somebody makes that saves power is a step in the right direction. Turning off their computer is a good step, even if they don't bike to work.
it's called sleep mode.
Placing a memory image on flash that can be loaded directly into RAM? Who knew? Didn't the Amiga do something like this with the Kickstart Chip, only it was ROM?
None the less, it's still a pretty neat concept, not to mention one that's been rather neglected. I wonder if this will become a big deal in the future. I hope it catches on with desktops soon, since this kind of thing could have a lot more applications than just fast loads. Moreover, I hope that software becomes available that could allow this to be done with existing flash devices. That'd be pretty nice, what with IDE flash registers and USB flash crud being available and all.
Sweet. I can't wait to insta-boot to my copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
They can be killed by running task manager as SYSTEM.
Okay, I Googled, and the most interesting thing I found was a comment by a reader after this MSDN blog entry:
First I'd ever heard of that.Is there some other method?
i'm guessing you have very shitty ram
PDPs with magnetic core memory could be made to pick up where you left off after a power interuption. Execute op, increment PC... not only was the memory non-volatile, it was practically immune to the transient power spiking that typically comes before and after a power failure.
I can remember sitting in the dark in a University computer center waiting for the power to come back on so I could finish my work...
If you were referring to your situation exclusively, you should have avoided making this statement:
"I suppose you ride your bicycle to work and never drive by car or take the bus? If you do, you have done worse for the nature in a couple of miles than a computer does in its lifetime."
Which is all I was making a counterargument against. You quite clearly did *not* mean just yourself, as you called out the original poster for "doing worse for the nature" by driving a few miles than a computer does in its entire lifetime. I pointed out that was false.
*YOUR* computer may be fine and dandy on hydroelectric power, but that's not what you said. It may have been your intention to state it differently, but I cannot read your mind over the internet yet.
The numbers are still valid. Your computer still uses as much power as a car driven short distances every few days. Sure, the power you're using is cleanly generated, but if you weren't using it, it would be available on the grid for someone else to use, offsetting dirty generation somewhere else.
Give you that ... almost. Hurried explanations are a boor. Try perceptual for the timebeing.
Great, so is all photography LOL. Jessops to you :)
Aha, "commonly"?
and inaccurately, since there is only one plane of focus. The DOF limit is the COC (Circle of Confusion) limit beyond which detail is inadequately resolved to be percieved in focus by the eye (another limiter as a good human eye resolves approx 8 lppm.)
No again, (and what is it with this commonly save and hand waving?) they have shorter focal lengths. Are you saying that a feature shot on Super 16 has wider angle shots by definition than one on anamorphic 65mm? Sounds like it. Incorrect. "Wide angle" is just a descriptive term for FOV (Field Of View). On a smaller format you need shorter focals (wider lens as you inaccurately portray) because the sensor or film is smaller so only the theoretic center is cropped compared with the larger sensor / imager / halide substrate.
No, only when viewed at a proportionately greater distance.
Actually, yes, but only partially correct. Unless you're running some hard core deconvolution algorithms in post, which changes the whole ballgame, you would have been right is you said that the limits of the DOF are set (permitting I may use this awful misleading DOF word for brevity).
But let's aside for illustration. You have a luma gradient with 8 bits of information, 0 through 255. It's perfectly smooth at proverbial first sight. Now enlarge it. Do you start to see the bands between discrete levels? Now do you see what i mean by changing the perceived DOF at bigger enlargements.
Er, that's a function of the effect i have been describing, and happens more quickly than you might think, within an envelope Ill try to better describe below.
Hmm, i mangled the word "psychologically" to hand wave a point, which I am now in the process of explaining. By reply you've mangled a pretty inarticulate insult.
DOF is not "core" to photography. What rot. Its a compositional rule of thumb, to be thrown out as you please, and it's a function that can be calculated from the focal length, subject distance, aperture, diffraction, resolving power of the imaging substrate, plane of focus *and* _resolving power of taking lens_. It is further complicated by the method of display, the point which is being made here, and the point at which the eye brain starts to play a significant role.
If
Hmmm, I'm dating myself. Also, I made a slight error in using the term 'TSR', as a TSR was a USEFUL program that resides in memory...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This I don't believe would change the architecture of a pee cee to much, in my opinion I think the flash memory is meant to suppliment the HDD. I still think we will see this technology popping up in ibooks, cheap flash memory plus intel plus steve jobs boys I think we have our selves a conspiracy.
Clearing PRAM now takes 3 minutes. ;-)
Compatability is an illusion -- you can't install WinXP on a 16-bit processor, much less an 8-bit one.
Boy do you have it backassward. The point is that one can run any 32-bit or 16-bit or 8-bit OS on brand-new Intel hardware. This allows you to upgrade your hardware enviornment without forcing a much more expensive software migration.
You see, the value is not backward-compatibility, it's forward-compatibility. No matter what software stack you choose to purchase today, it will always work on PC hardware in the future.
This is one thing Apple Computer never has understood. If they had allowed users to upgrade software on their schedules, rather than Apple's, their marketshare would probably be over 20% today.
So why are the hardware limitations of XP systems still being driven by compatibility with 8-bit processors?
There's very few such limitations left today. Most legacy PC AT features are emulated on top of hardware which leads the industry in performance. Big exception is BIOS, and that's getting the same treatment next year.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.