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How Kernel Hackers Boosted the Speed of Desktop Linux

Posted by timothy on from the mild-claims dept.

chromatic writes "Kernel hackers Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok showed off Linux booting in five seconds at last month's Linux Plumbers Conference. Arjan and other hackers have already improved the Linux user experience by reducing power consumption and latency. O'Reilly News interviewed him about his work on improving the Linux experience with PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot."

8 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Kudos to you sir, for reducing the time it takes to type congratulations by instead using grats!

  2. Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements by Bryansix · · Score: 5, Funny

    Actually Vista with 4 Gigs of RAM boots pretty quickly. It's once it's up that it is slow.

  3. Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    You can boot Vista with only 4 Gigs of ram?

  4. On an old Pentium III laptop... by mikael · · Score: 5, Funny

    My stepfather still has an old Pentium III laptop with Windows 95 running on it. Booting the laptop to read an E-mail takes around 20 minutes. His advice to anyone who wants to use it, "switch on the PC, do something else like have a bath, do the lawn, read the newspaper, or have a coffee, and the PC will be ready to use before you know it".

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  5. Re:Does it matter? by not+already+in+use · · Score: 5, Funny

    How ironic, with all the Vista bashing that tends to go on in threads like these. Vista boots relatively quickly, and hasn't been powered down for me for weeks since suspend/wake works perfectly.

    But at least someone, somewhere can boot linux in 5 seconds.

    --
    Similes are like metaphors
  6. Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements by CODiNE · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, Safe Mode.

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    Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
  7. Get out of my lawn! by snikulin · · Score: 4, Funny
    All modern OSes suck in boot time.
    CP/M was probably OK but my Zilog-based PC had floppies only so it sucked too.
    MS-DOS 3.0 was up and running in 1-2 seconds (assuming you had a hard drive and empty config.sys and autexec.bat).

    Then MS rewrote DOS in that punky and slow new language "C" and since then everything went down. The next thing you see is that HIGHMEM.SYS driver taking your precious memory out of 640KB for the promise of semi-useless XMS memory for overlays. Oh well...

    Now my kernel sits during boot on 4GB RAM looking for un-present USB devices and waiting for eth0 to figure out DHCP.

    I guess Bill Gates was right and 640KB is right amount for everybody so OS would not get confused with all those amounts of bits laying around.

  8. Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements by Anpheus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ah, the old, "I have discovered a truly marvelous method to improve Linux which the margins of my free time are too narrow to allow me to code."

    Still keep writing.