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Boot Windows Vista In Four Seconds
arcticstoat writes "Asus' budget motherboard wing, ASRock, claims that it's found a way to load a clean boot of Windows from a full shut down in just four seconds, using its new Instant Boot technology. The technology takes advantage of the S3 and S4 features of ACPI, which normally enable the Sleep/Standby and Hibernation modes in Windows respectively. However, by calling them at different times in the boot-up and shutdown process, Instant Boot enables you to boot up to your Windows desktop in three to four seconds, even after a proper shut down. Two modes are available; Fast mode, which uses S3 and boots up in around four seconds, and Regular Mode, which uses S4 and apparently takes between 20 and 22 seconds to boot. The advantage of Instant Boot when compared with normal Sleep and Hibernation modes is that you get the advantage of a clean boot of Windows, without what ASRock calls 'accumulated garbage data,' and you also get the security of knowing that you won't lose any data if there's a power cut and you lose AC power. There's also a video of it in action at the link above."
That was my first thought too. Do they make any attempts at detecting whether the OS was updated, or new software was installed that requires a reboot, so they can perform a full boot and update the startup snapshot when needed?
My guess, is that it wouldn't matter. As when you turn off their computer, they probably behind the scenes turn it back on again. Then hibernate. So a normal "reboot" would be a little slower than usual, and to a user every power on is like opening a fresh copy.
This is still cheating - it's first of all not actually booting but suspending/resuming (albeit smartly).
Most importantly the system is not actually shut down, so it still draws power to refresh the memory. This will likely suck on high-performance laptops where the large amounts of ram with high voltages will suck the battery dry in a substantially short time.
And worse, this technology will take a _long_ time to shutdown. It's sacrificing a lot. We can (really) boot+shutdown a linux box in +- 10 seconds. Would you want a 3 second boot if your shutdown time becomes one minute?
For people who are on the go a lot and tend to open/close their laptops a lot, this may actually reduce their effective work time a lot.
Of course you can get the same effect yourself by rebooting then just putting your machine to sleep when you want to shutdown. Someone could probably even write a simple software solution for this rather than requiring a whole new motherboard.
Hmm. It seems like it'd be really easy to do this with an open source OS. I think I may have just found a nifty little project for this weekend. All it should take is:
At that point "sudo init 7" should cause your machine to shut down to "instant boot" state. Hitting the power button will then "instant boot" it.
"sudo init 0" or "sudo init 6" will do a normal shutdown or a normal reboot.
The final step would be to modify the "shutdown" command to go to runlevel 7 when given some new option, and then to modify the GUI-based shutdown tools to provide the instant-boot option as well, and maybe make it the default. Oh, and maybe modify the ACPI script that's executed when the power button is hit so that the power button does a "shutdown to instant boot" by default.
Pretty easy. Of course, in Linux I don't ever see any reason to shut the machine down anyway. My laptop pretty much only gets rebooted when there's a kernel update to install. Other than that, it just gets suspended. So, kind of pointless in Linux, but easy. The same would apply to *BSD.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I wonder if something like this could be done with Linux now that 2.6.27.5 has been out for a few days and that situation with the RESET_REG_SUP bit has been resolved. This certainly is great news for Vista users looking for a new board.
It's been done in 5 seconds..
Doesn't even require a special motherboard, they did it by modifying Fedora on a EEE pc (something not known for it's speed)
http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/arjanintel
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