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Fast-Booting OS for Usually-Off Appliance PCs?
An anonymous reader writes "I have some older computer equipment at work that I want to re-purpose as application appliances. The machines will sit, unpowered, until needed, then powered up. No way around the 'sitting powered off' — company directive. What is the quickest-booting OS I could use for them? I know about LinuxBIOS, but that would require new hardware, which does not go along which the re-purposing theme. Some of them do not need to be connected to a network, so an old version of Linux or Windows 98 are possible. DOS is too old to consider. So what are my options?"
http://www.splashtop.com/
There you go.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Linux + hibernate (swsusp, TuxOnIce) functionality.
No sig, sorry.
Since Windows 98 IS nothing but DOS with a copy of Windows that autoloads once booted why not use it? You can even modify the initialization scripts to have it boot up with a DOS prompt and then type WIN to run Windows 98. Did it all the time back in the day.
More realistically, there is this interesting Linux distribution, Webconverger:
http://webconverger.com/
I've used it for a few web-only systems. Boots up fast enough. Use it as a starting point to tweak. Basically, firefox becomes your operating system and UI. Neat idea.
there is " damn small linux " http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ you could even install it in the /boot partition of fedora as a backup os
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
DSL linux is really fast when installed on a Hdd.
Just to be clear: You intend to have old machines sitting around unpowered and then someone WALKS UP TO THEM and presses the power button. The user then waits for the OS to boot and does his thing. Correct?v
So what are these systems being used for? Kiosks? This is critical to determining what you need. For example, QNX boots very quickly but it's an embedded Unix system. But QNX probably won't run whatever app it is you want to run on these systems.
Basically, you said they are going to be application appliances. WHAT application?
Take a look at DSL and Puppy Linux. Both are tiny and would boot quickly from a CompactFlash. DSL is probably better for all-around appliance use; Puppy is intended for use as a desktop OS.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
http://www.puppylinux.org/
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
That's funny, because the latest version of DOS that I have is dated September 3, 2006.
Is that too old now?
Any OS with hibernate should be quick enough. I doubt systems vary too much between them. Anything that uses minimal ram and hance has less to load on boot. Just go with whatever OS suits you best.
Some Panasonic Viera consumer HDTV sets run on a version of Linux. It takes 6 or 7 seconds to boot from ROM.
BeOS really was pretty amazing in this respect, and some others. Multithreading was far ahead of anything else at the time, and probably since, as well. On some older machine (P3-ish; much slower HDD than nowadays) I clocked boot time at 15 seconds, OS/2 and Linux distros of the time were more like 1-1.5 minutes on the same hardware.
The way it booted so fast was largely by deferring a lot of the "initialization" stuff until the system was "booted". This is nothing like the awful way Windows (and to a lesser extent KDE/Gnome desktops) keep loading stuff for a good while, letting you see the desktop for a minute before you can really do anything. Under BeOS, said multithreading was well utilized to give you a responsive GUI right at that 15 seconds, but still do background loads of various background processes that you didn't *really* need immediately.
Of course, if you immediately launched something that *did* need the services of something loading in a background thread, you'd obviously have to wait a few more seconds. But even all that background loading was very efficient, and practically, by the time you could make a few clicks, it was loaded.
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You have a requirement for fast booting but you just blunder ahead and elimiate DOS from the running right from the start.
DOS can make a very capable platform if you don't need the support services of a more sophisticated OS. There is no question that it can be made to boot faster than most other off the shelf OS's. You don't mention what you need to run on these machines so it is hard to tell what will be suitable for you. You can run most *NIX shell apps under a DOS environment using DJGPP and its 32-bit extender. FreeDOS has a lot of drivers to handle more modern hardware. If you need something closer to a true *NIX system that boots fast, QNX is worth considering too.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
... built off BeOS, I thinks ;)
You're doing something very wrong. We have XPe based thinterms that boot almost instantly from cold power up.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I have personally seen the kernel portion of a boot on an embedded board reduced to 186 milliseconds, using aggressive techniques such as Execute-in-Place.
For user space, customize your init scripts (actually, dump your init scripts in favor of one compiled /sbin/init binary).
In the x86 space, with legacy hardware, I think the thing that will give you the most problem is BIOS. I know of products with custom code that replaces BIOS, that load the kernel from ROM in under 150 milliseconds. But that's probably more effort than you are interested in. You may want to check out what options are available in your current (legacy) BIOS for skipping things like the POST test, etc.
You could try an x86 build of OpenWRT and use CF rather than HDD. On router devices, OpenWRT boots up in about 10 seconds, but I'm sure the BIOS on a PC would add to the bootup time. I haven't tried it on a PC but I've seen that others have.
Then of course there always LFS, DSL, various Slack distros, etc. but you still get limited by the bios.
You may want to check over on the mp3car.com forums. I've seen a couple threads over there on getting machines to boot up quick, though I couldn't comment on the quality of the content.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
Why do good posts like this so often get modded badly, while FALSE posts like those contradicting it get modded insightful.
Read:
"Splashtop is preinstalled on the hard drive or in the on-board Flash memory of new PCs and motherboards by their manufacturers. Splashtop is a software-only solution that requires no additional hardware. A small component of Splashtop is embedded in the BIOS of the PC - that's the part that runs as soon as you press the power button."
This should make it obvious, along with the couple intelligent posters who noted that it can boot from an HD.
Maybe Slashdot needs to start restricting mod points to those who aren't idiots?
Windows 98 is okay but DOS is too old? Eh?
First, we have NO idea what you actually want. Are these going to be running dumb terminals, displays, "embedded device" roles, what? What sort of machines are we talking about? What sort of budget do you consider acceptable?
Seriously, if you want things to boot THAT quick, you're either going to have to spend money (LinuxBIOS, replacing with ARM or other embedded devices etc.) or you're going to have to compromise (DOS or some other really-cut-down OS). FreeDOS is used in these sorts of things all the time, even for networking appliances with appropriate drivers loaded. People have FreeDOS MP3 players in place of their CD-players in their car. Virtually-instant to boot.
Back in the day, you could get an old DOS machine to boot really quickly if you optimised everything and cut out all the cruft (BIOS boot times were actually a large part of it, unfortunately, what with memory-checks, floppy-checks etc.) . Guess what, you won't get that same machine to boot any quicker today without replacing parts.
If you have minimal actual software requirements (i.e. they ain't doing anything fancy and need to boot REALLY fast), then you're looking at DOS. Otherwise you're looking at Linux (if you want to keep licensing, support, compatibility costs down) unless you want to buy XP licenses for them all. Wouldn't like to think what Windows 98 would work like in this on/off scenario. I suspect that it would start crashing out, hitting filesystem checks, etc. eventually no matter what you tried. And Windows 98 is SLOW to boot. Incredibly so. For a start, it loads DOS first and then kicks itself in after that!
After you've sorted the OS, if you're still struggling then you can look at things like LinuxBIOS (sorry, but that's the only way you'll speed up the BIOS boot times on older PC's but the chances are that it's just not supported for your chipset).
To be honest, from a power-saving perspective, just bin the lot (see if you can get a few quid for them first) and then buy some Gumstix or similar embedded board, Mini-ITX etc. You can literally leave something like that on 24/7 and not pull anywhere near the power you would draw with an old PC in one hour. And you can have them boot extremely fast and minimally.
Re-using old hardware is great. Expecting it to perform brilliantly isn't. Booting reliably into a powerful, full-featured OS in a handful of seconds *is* performing brilliantly. We couldn't do it back in the days of DOS devices with standard PC's, you aren't going to manage it now without making some cutbacks on your expectations. And then for about £50 each, you can get tiny, powerful, power-saving, fan-free, embedded ARM units with Linux that'll do anything you want.
You have unrealistic expectations.
As most people said: it entirely depends on your application, but Minix (www.minix3.org) boots darn fast. It has some serious downsides (such as limited software availability and lack of drivers), but if you get it to work it works like a charm. Also, the microkernel design is clearly superior to the monolithic kernel design many operating systems use these days :P
Try AmigaOS loading from a proper hard drive instead of floppy, it takes longer to spin up the drive than it does to boot to workbench. I could get my A4000 to boot in 5 seconds from pressing the power switch.
I wonder what one of those solid state drives would do for it... I have a 32Mb solid state IDE drive somewhere, thats big enough for AmigaOS...
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This is hard to find information. In most test pc are rated under load.
but Here
. I was shocked to discover just what an inefficient beast the desktop is: even when the computer and monitor are physically turned off, they continue to draw 31 watts from the wall (precisely what the laptop consumes when it is on and in use).
I was sure i read such values from a test on tomshardware, but i fail to locate it now.
*Points to MenuetOS.*
you can boot the entire OS direct from floppy. Programmed in x86/x64 assembler (Yea there are 32 and 64 bit versions) and it will fit your purpose for non-networked machines (getting the network to work requires a little assembler knowledge)
It also boots faster than anything else I've ever seen, next to a NES game.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.