New Phoenix BIOS Starts Windows 7 Boot In 1 Second

suraj.sun excerpts from a tantalizing Engadget post: "Phoenix is showing off a few interesting things at IDF, but the real standout is their new Instant Boot BIOS [video here], a highly optimized UEFI implementation that can start loading an OS in just under a second. Combined with Windows 7's optimized startup procedure, that means you're looking at incredibly short boot times — we saw a retrofitted Dell Adamo hit the Windows desktop in 20 seconds, while a Lenovo T400s with a fast SSD got there in under 10."

Comments

Re:BIOS

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Could be a while. Given how infrequently most servers are rebooted, and how having at least a backup, better a hot spare, or better still on-line redundancy for servers you actually care about is fairly standard, there probably isn't nearly as much demand.

Also, I suspect, more of the server delays have to do with real needs(notably staggered spin-up of drive arrays) or coordination issues between vendors(your server manufacturer can't do much about how much time a 3rd party RAID controller's option ROM decides to waste once it takes over, and even integrated controllers are usually just 3rd party stuff with some degree of rebadge).

You'll probably actually see fast boot sooner in the cheap seats, which are much more likely to just be a basic business box relabeled as a "pedestal server" or reboxed as a cheap 1/2U and will thus be able to borrow the fast boot stuff directly from the consumer lines. That is also where servers are much less likely to be backed by any serious redundancy, which would make coming up quickly more of a selling point.

Re:BIOS

[dolphinling]

It's not really all that fast. With coreboot there's an option to flash a kernel directly to your bios chip, and skip bios and bootloader entirely. Makes kernel upgrades a pain, of course, but they got wall time from poweron to a working linux shell down to three seconds.