Get Speed-Booting with an Open BIOS

An anonymous reader writes to mention that IBM Developer Works has a quick look at some of the different projects that are working on replacing proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined code that can load a Linux kernel much faster. Most of the existing BIOS systems tend to have a lot of legacy support built in for various things, and projects like LinuxBIOS and OpenBIOS are working to trim the fat.

Comments

Deck chairs on the Titanic

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The majority of boot time is spent initializing drivers and bringing the system to a usable state. The 3 seconds it takes for the BIOS to init the disk, locate the MBR, load the bootloader, and jump to it is negligible compared to the tedious hardware scanning and initialization done by the OS itself when it is finally loaded by the bootloader.

If you want to speed up the boot sequence, take a look at cutting the number of attached devices down to the bare minimum. Don't start any services during init. Do as little as possible to get the system to its usable state and you'll have minimized the boot time. Unfortunately, technology just doesn't work that way. System requirements (of both a hardware and a software nature) will require that you perform extra initialization at boot time, so any possible gains are already offset by the increased load.

Getting off of x86 may be one way to optimize the boot process, but how many of us really have the wherewithal to make an architecture jump from x86?

Re:Deck chairs on the Titanic

[KC1P]

You're absolutely right. It seems like every OS (including Linux) goes through this -- in the early days it boots much faster than the competition, but once people start routinely layering all kinds of junk on it then it starts taking minutes to boot even on super-fast hardware.

What really bugs me is how much of the startup config is done serially. A lot of startup tasks take time, and step N+1 has to wait until step N is finished whether or not it depends on that step. It seems to me that it would be worth the trouble to mechanize startup so that each step is isolated from all the others and knows which previous step it's dependent on and waits for only that step, while everything else cruises ahead in parallel. It'd be a big change from the way things are done now but it'd be worth it. Having my system stop dead for 60 seconds on every boot just because one of the NICs is unplugged (so DHCP isn't answering) is really annoying. Same deal with Apache choking on virtual domains ... one at a time ... if the name server isn't answering. All those "wait X seconds for Y to happen" things can really add up.

Also, Linux isn't the entire universe, and some of us really do use those legacy BIOS features. Backwards compatibility is the *only* reason the PC architecture has survived, so deciding to toss that to the wind now is just stupid. The cost is minimal (it's not like the code is going to change once it's written) and if whipping up a few tables and setting a couple of INT vectors is honestly adding dozens of seconds to the boot time, well that's just programmer incompetence, it's not the architecture's fault. The rest of the older BIOS code doesn't do anything if you don't call it, so this just sounds like an excuse to be lazy.

In theory, yes.

[khasim]

But the problem is that the BIOS's cannot be trusted today.

So the more advanced operating systems probe the devices themselves to see what capabilities are available.

We've arrived at the point where we need to choose between updating the BIOS's on the motherboards every time a new capability is added (and all previous motherboards) ... or just simplifying the BIOS to the point where it can boot the OS and allow the OS to probe everything.

It's easier to update the OS than the BIOS.

Benefits from experience

[vil3nr0b]

I have repaired clusters for the last two years and most have OpenBios. These are the likes: 1)Fast as hell!! 2)Easy to change options 3)Can mount the file to a disk, edit, and then replace. 4)Errors can be determined by watching console, No video needed. One serial cable, One laptop=priceless. 5)Free