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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'.
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?"
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.
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?
The worst part is that Windows doesn't have an unconditional kill so some process just never dies and never lets go of all the files and handles.
Yes it does. Killing a process from task manager is the same thing as kill -9. When the process dies it unconditionally releases all file handles, mutexes, and any other resources that it had open.
The only time that won't work is if the process is stuck in a system call somewhere (i.e. in the kernel). That usually means buggy device drivers which unfortunately are all too common in the Windows world. It could also be a bona-fide kernel bug, though those are fairly rare (but I do know of one way to cause a vfs lockup on any version of NT -- including fully patched 2k3 server -- without admin rights).
I see the same thing happen all the time on Linux. For example if a process is stuck trying to read a file that's on an nfs server that has become unreachable, not even kill -9 will get rid of it. Even *BSD sometimes gets unkillable processes in cases where the underlying hardware has gone to lunch. I see it sometimes with flaky CD burners, for example.