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Startup Offers Instant-Boot Windows Alternative
Lucas123 writes "A Silicon Valley startup named Device VM has a product that circumvents the boot-up process, according to a story in MIT's Technology Review. Device VM recently released a tiny piece of software that gives users the option to boot either Windows or a faster, less-complex operating system called Splashtop. The company is partnering with PC OEMs and consumer electronics companies to integrate its core technology into desktops, notebooks, ultra-mobile PCs, and other devices."
Just wondering which flavor of linux is splashtop based on? (i.e. Distro, Window manager, etc.)
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
No kidding. "Look, we invented booting from ROM, only slower".
Windows is slow to boot. OS X is pretty good, but it's no speed demon. But I just close the lid on my MacBook Pro and it goes to sleep. It actually seems to take 10-20 seconds to do this, but it's reliable so in reality I don't have to worry about it. Resuming is done as fast as the display can come up, if not faster. It is, for all practical purposes, instant.
Hibernating in Windows is much slower every time I've seen it, ranging from relatively fast to almost as bad as a cold boot for me.
If you want your computer up fast, just put it to sleep.
The only problem is when you must turn it off (say moving a desktop from one room to another, something that doesn't come up much, obviously). We'll never get to instant boots again, because hardware has to be initialized. Back when you were just loading an interpreter out of ROM it was that fast, but any time you touch a disk, it's going to be slow. SSDs speed things up, but when your OS starts taking up 1-5 gigs (as Windows and OS X do) you'll still pay a penalty. Again, that doesn't include warm up time that some card may need before it starts working (like the negotiation on a network card, but longer).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Splashtop sounds good, but TFA portrays it as requiring the user to pick between OSes at boot. That sucks if the user wants a fast boot and eventual access to all their "real" applications. Instead, I see more need for a light weight interim OS (a preOS??) that boots and lets the user do a few things while the main OS continues to boot in the background. Something like Splashtop could boot first, launch a couple of key "first-thing" apps (e.g. web with some morning news or email) and then transfer the session data to the main OS once it's up and running. After a minute (or whatever) Splashtop would crossfade to the main OS and decommission itself.
Of course, the real solution is stable instant-on low power modes (and OSes) that make the morning boot wholly obsolete.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Most of the computers that would benefit from this - business computers networked to applications or security routines / login scripts / cruft cleaners - would be the ones most likely to have it disabled. I'm not sure I want another network-capable application running under the radar, even if it is Linux.
Besides, who wants to get started any faster in the morning.? Long coffee breaks because the computer is booting up can be considered a feature, not a bug.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This would probably have to be implemented using virtual machines. This too, could offer interesting possibilities, like pausing and resuming your Windows session as needed, easily reverting the Windows disk image, and so on. Potentially this could indeed speed up the Windows boot time (by loading the VM image rather than going through the full Windows startup process).
To me, the interesting thing was embedding the OS in the BIOS.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
What?
Intel's working on making software and hardware advances to cut the boot time. AMD will likely follow suit, as will other BIOS vendors/makers. That can't but HELP be good for Linux.
But, I suppose Linux can boot in under 14 seconds if it's an embedded device doing non-PC work.
Suspend and hibernate are nice, but maybe even this could be good for VirtualBox and other virtual machine environments.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Not only that, but this story was covered back in October. In fact, the old one was even better, since it was more descriptive and not misleading in the title or description...
/., but because all the PHB's out there that think these magazines are a good source of information on upcoming technology, one of 'em posts it to here, where we've known about it for months...
At least the old article mentioned that it was Asus to be first making these boards (the dupe only has a screenshot of the bootloader having an Asus logo. Or that it would first be available on Asus's Intel X38 motherboards...
I think along with myself, a lot of people are getting tired of dupes on stories from months ago, with "articles" by "IT companies/magazines" that read old stories on
Since I turned off automatic Windows updates I rarely worry about shutting down and rebooting.
I hope it has really good power management, because otherwise that's an extreme waste of energy.
It's funny how many slashdotters are posting to say that Windows sucks and boots slow, and of course the solution is to run Linux. I run Linux, but one of the things I'm least happy about is the horrible support for power management. None of the sleep, hibernate, etc., options work on my machine at all. I don't know the solution to the problem, either, because it sounds like the problem is basically that manufacturers refuse to openly document the registers that need to be saved when their devices go to sleep. If I had working power management, then I wouldn't need to shut down my computer so often, and I wouldn't care much what my boot times were. This is all much bigger issue on laptops, of course.
I believe one of the reasons Linux doesn't boot faster than it does is that there's a kernel feature that, for security, randomizes the addresses at which various code is loaded into memory each time you boot. This is supposed to protect against buffer overflows that jump to a fixed address in memory. The problem is that it means you can't speed up booting by simply caching an image of the initialized state of a lot of your memory in a freshly booted system.
I don't know about other people's Linux boxes, but on mine the time taken to start Gnome is comparable to the time it takes to boot into gdm. That's one of the reasons I run fluxbox rather then Gnome.
Find free books.
I really wish vendors made better use of scheduled tasks for update checking. Java, for instance, installs an at-logon time update checker. There's no reason that they couldn't schedule a task every 3 hours to do the following:
1. Star the updater app.
2. Check lastupdatetime.dat.
3. Has it been more than a week since I checked for updates?
4. Yes it has - check now.
The updater stub can be very lean -- a few dozen KB at most, and launch a heavier-duty updater as needed.
Everyone wins - the system stays up to date and the user doesn't get bogged down with retarded logon applications. Best of all, the user can change update checks - or disable them entirely - from one central scheduled tasks panel.
Places to look:
- In the registry, HKLM/LocalMachine/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run
- Startup folder, explore start menu for all users and current user, in Programs>Startup
- Windows services, Start>Run, then type "services.msc"
If you've never done this before (there *might* be a slashdot reader who hasn't...) then you'll be happy to discover you probably tear out vast chunks of autostarting garbage. Some of it, however, you can only remove if you don't want the software to work. And a lot of it will just come right back anyway at the first update.I know of several programs that refuse to work if they can't keep their background services running, and all of them add themselves to the startup without asking and come back at every application update. This trend has gotten bad enough that I've taken to explicitly blocking applications from network access, which really shouldn't be necessary. I've also stopped using Adobe products entirely. You just can't beat Photoshop or Acrobat (and no Foxit doesn't count, even though that's what I use now), but you also can't beat Adobe for installing useless, crippling, invasive bloatware without asking. FNPLicensingService? Hell no. Get off my machine. Sure you can handle a little service here or there, but in aggregate they quickly become unsustainable. Screw that.
I'm too tired of fighting software that behaves like that. Adobe? Out. Foxit? GIMP? Sure. I trust them a lot more.
You can also use the Adobe Customization Wizard to roll out an install of Acrobat that doesn't suck as bad, but I'm done playing catch-up with them and I'd rather work with programs that play well with others.