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New Phoenix BIOS Starts Windows 7 Boot In 1 Second

Posted by timothy on from the nice-start dept.

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."

51 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. BIOS by sopssa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That is indeed really fast boot to desktop. I like it how it shows the Windows loading screen almost immediatly too.

    This also brings a new friend for F5 hitting. To get to the bios menu you'll be smashing F12 as fast as you can during boot.

    But the article is a little low on details of optimizations. As I've understood, BIOS isn't really that complicated nor does it do any heavy calculations. It basically just brings hardware up and tests it, which takes most of the time (not that the 5-6 seconds is so long wait anyway). So have they optimized something else, or are they just skipping those tests?

    1. Re:BIOS by gmack · · Score: 3, Funny

      I wonder when they will get around to to doing this on servers. I have some that are pushing 5 minutes before the OS even loads.

    2. Re:BIOS by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:BIOS by WoLpH · · Score: 3, Insightful

      5? WIth a nice raidcard, full memory check and some other POST tests I've seen them easily go over 10 minutes. Some were definately close to 15 minutes from my experiences.

      The question here is, what will you trade for this? Faster boot probably means something will be skipped.

    4. Re:BIOS by dolphinling · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
    5. Re:BIOS by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm sure that there is some slack in the process, largely because POST times aren't a huge point of competition; but, until SSDs take over, there will be real physical limits on how much parallelizing you can do.

      With HDDs, especially the very fast ones, spin-up current is substantially higher than operating current. If you have a bunch of them in the same place, you either have to massively overspec the 12volt rail, or just stagger the spin-ups and do them in batches. Each drive can only spin up so fast, and you can only be sure they are all working after they have all spun up.

    6. Re:BIOS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      New BIOSs are UEFI.

      As much as they don't like to say it, UEFI is basically an operating system. UEFI supports byte code applications (that's right). It has a driver framework and drivers for many of your devices, a TCP/IP stack, etc...

      I think that's a good question about how you enter setup. If you can through keypresses, that time is too short to include keyboard initialization I would think. Since this is a laptop, they would be using their own keyboard firmware and they cheat. So it probably wouldn't work on a desktop or with an external keyboard.

      I haven't looked into details into their optimizations either, but I would assume, yes, they are skipping a lot of things. This is on a laptop, so they probably just assume fixed hardware. Many things which are detected are probably just saved.

      I doubt you would be able to boot from USB or CD with that set up, since those devices are not initialized.

      Intel have a document about the breakdown on UEFI BIOS boot time: http://edc.intel.com/Link.aspx?id=1039

      Out of interest, just having to change video modes to show the BIOS screen can be a couple seconds.

    7. Re:BIOS by __aamnbm3774 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Computers are lightning fast compare to a few years ago, there should be no need to 'poll hardware, wait 3 seconds, test next piece of hardware'.

      If properly parallelized and you remove all the pointless Waits, a BIOS check should be damn-near close to immediate and still manage to check everything.

      BIOS writers probably figured, eh, so what if it takes 10 seconds or so, thats still pretty quick, and never rewrote their crappy legacy code.

    8. Re:BIOS by TheLink · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually you'd think most people would want servers that are infrequently rebooted to come back up really fast.

      But yeah, you can't spin up that many drives at once. I've heard a server where the drives were making up and down "pitch" changes during boot up... Not good :).

      --
    9. Re:BIOS by clone53421 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Nah. I'd tend to agree with GP. If you're a critical service, you want on-line redundancy, so you roll over immediately and it doesn't matter how long the second server takes to reboot. If you're not critical and you don't have redundant servers, 5 minutes of down-time probably isn't much worse than 1... you just have to schedule it at an off-peak time.

      --
      Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
    10. Re:BIOS by GravityStar · · Score: 2, Informative

      It is just you. My Pentium 90 took something like 20-30 seconds to boot to the DOS prompt. Anecdotal, true, but it's nice to remind yourself that even booting into DOS was by no means instantaneous.

      I don't think I have a point beyond that. Sorry, carry on about those days. Was it something about marching up hill in the snow?

    11. Re:BIOS by pjr.cc · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, how often it boots and fast it boots are often small considerations - depending on where you sit.

      Consider a file server that crashes and reboots twice a year and takes 5 minutes to come back up... thats 99.998% availability and from an infrastructure perspective thats pretty dang awesome.
      From a helpdesk point of view, they'll suffer one heck of a beeting everytime it goes down and that'll be all they remember of the server.
      Same goes for the users, all they'll remember is the 5 minutes it went down when half the company was doing something important.

      Consider active directory though (or any kind of multi-master replicated service) - again, your talking about a server thats really not doing anything terribly difficult, but unlike the file server if it goes down no ones likely to notice. On top of that your often more concerned that the server will come up working then how quickly.

      As for noise, well the good ol e450 from sun fully stacked with 20 15k disks (not to mention its in-built fans) used to make very amusing noises as it came up and some of the time it went down was because the disks managed to disconnect from the backplane (and you could hear the difference if you were around it during a boot often enough) - a good hard whack and it was sorted. Wondefull little machines those

    12. Re:BIOS by jspenguin1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have a server here that take 65 seconds to even show the BIOS screen. It takes another 60 seconds to even start the bootloader. Sometimes it feels like the extraterrestrial object it's named after is going to burn out before the thing boots.

    13. Re:BIOS by grub · · Score: 3, Funny

      You have a computer that's not doing anything?

      Weirdo!

      --
      Trolling is a art,
    14. Re:BIOS by poetmatt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not really, the magic is in the wording. "Start loading the OS within 1 second" means it's just bypassing a whole lot of the network checks. The average BIOS starts loading the OS within about 1.5 seconds, so this isn't exactly a huge difference.

      This isn't even a windows thing or a linux thing, as it's strictly about how fast the bios passes to loading the OS from the hard drive.

    15. Re:BIOS by kimvette · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're not going to get that kind of uptime from a Windows box even without problems, thanks to patch tuesdays. Of course, it depends on how downtime is defined. If you use Microsoft's definition, "scheduled maintenance windows" are not classified as down time, but the rest of the world defines such things as down time. This is how they skewed the numbers to get such high uptime statistics for their "get the FUD" campaign.

      without redefining down time like Microsoft does, you will never achieve that kind of uptime on Windows unless a) the box NEVER get infected b) you NEVER install the Windows updates and c) you NEVER change the configuration or change/update any software.

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    16. Re:BIOS by clone53421 · · Score: 2, Informative

      1 second isn't the boot to desktop time, it's the time needed for the BIOS before transferring control to the OS. How long the OS takes to get to the desktop is a separate concern.

      --
      Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
    17. Re:BIOS by Xest · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Do you actually read the patches that come along on patch Tuesday or do you just mindlessly install them?

      If you did the former, you'd see you don't actually need to install them and reboot every Tuesday, you could simply queue them up until there's a critical patch. Some you don't even need to install at all, if there's a critical flaw in IIS but you haven't got the IIS service enabled and never intend to, it's not worth rebooting the server over.

      You're making the mistake a lot of bad admins make- assuming you need to install the latest and greatest the second it's there. You don't, you only need to install patches to fix issues you're having or to fix security flaws that actually effect you. Yes this means you actually need to understand security and be able to judge whether a particular security flaw is exploitable in your situation or not.

      Regardless, what it comes down to is this, if you're having to reboot your servers more than a few times a year then you're not running a network as well as an IT professional really should do.

    18. Re:BIOS by operagost · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When making claims for availability as a service provider, scheduled maintenance is NOT counted in "the nines". You are making a guarantee of reliability, not uptime per se.

      --

      Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
    19. Re:BIOS by pehrs · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Funny. I know a network that ran just like that. In a hospital. Tightly controlled environment, mostly vendor approved windows NT4 and 2000 systems, no internet connection except for a very agressive proxy that filtered stuff. Heavy firewalling. Patching every half a year or so. Worked like a charm.

      Until the day a contractor upgraded a server for the MRI system using his work laptop. The radiology department was offline for nearly a week while they sorted out the mess. :(

    20. Re:BIOS by clone53421 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Your current machine takes 20-30 seconds merely to do the BIOS startup?

      The guy you were replying to was referring to a desktop boot, with the kernel loaded into the BIOS. You didn't specifically say, but I assumed.

      --
      Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
    21. Re:BIOS by Sandbags · · Score: 2, Interesting

      1) anything considdered a Tier 2 or business critical app should be a cluster, load balanced system, or simply be highly available with no single point of failure (switching, cabling, power and all for Tier 1 systems). Further, a cluster is never less than 3 of a kind, so when 1 is reboothing, high availability is maintained, so reboot time should be irrelevent.

      2) Reboots for patches should be done during maintenance windows, scheduled, and thus should never interfere with user operations. If it needs to be up 24x7, see #1.

      3) we have servers here that take 10-15 minutes to go DOWN. In nearly all cases, shutting down for a graceful reboot takes LONGER than coming up...

      --
      There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
    22. Re:BIOS by drsmithy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You're not going to get that kind of uptime from a Windows box even without problems, thanks to patch tuesdays.

      You don't _have_ to patch, you know, only if you are (or think you will be) impacted by the problems fixed.

      Of course, it depends on how downtime is defined. If you use Microsoft's definition, "scheduled maintenance windows" are not classified as down time, but the rest of the world defines such things as down time.

      No, it doesn't. Most SLAs allow for scheduled maintenance and do not consider that downtime. In any event, if your environment is such that the service must remain available during maintenance periods, then you can't do it with a single server, regardless of what your OS is.

      without redefining down time like Microsoft does, you will never achieve that kind of uptime on Windows unless a) the box NEVER get infected b) you NEVER install the Windows updates and c) you NEVER change the configuration or change/update any software.

      If your requirement allows for only minutes or hours of downtime per year, then you *must* have multiple servers to be able to confidently deliver it. Once you have multiple servers, individual server outages for scheduled maintenance, are irrelevant.

    23. Re:BIOS by WNight · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What are you doing that takes that long to shutdown? Is this just that you're doing work in 10-minute blocks and not stopping until the end of a block? Staggered app shutdown? Syncing a ton of uncached writes? Using 1980s hardware?

  2. yeah, but... by jollyreaper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After you see the desktop it's another minute for all the system tray crap to load. And if you're stuck with corporate antivirus? May as well throw some cinderblocks in the trunk of that nice sportscar and watch it do 0 to 60 like an arthritic Ford Pinto.

    --
    Kwisatz Haderach
    Sell the spice to CHOAM
    This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    1. Re:yeah, but... by LordKaT · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ... but if you're building a computer that requires a fast startup time - like an in-car PC - 10 second startup time is a godsend.

    2. Re:yeah, but... by Truekaiser · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Your confusing hardware and code. it's more to do with the ssd then windows code.

    3. Re:yeah, but... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Marketing:

      Windows now boots (the bios) in under a second giving you a faster user experience (but a usable desktop in roughly 10 minutes)

      Linux boots (to a usable desktop) in 25 seconds.

      Reading without the bits in brackets, which do you think is best? That's what marketing is all about.

  3. I have an idea by eclectro · · Score: 3, Funny

    If they could get rid of the vacuum tubes, Windows could turn on instantly.

    --
    Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
  4. Very important by poptones · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's very important they minimize windows boot times because, you know, windows users have to reboot so frequently...

  5. It will also "start to boot" Linux in 1 Second! by AftanGustur · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Great BIOS!

    But there is no special relationship between this bios and Windows 7, meaning that Linux can't also start-to-boot in 1 second!

    The Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 is going to start up in 10 seconds, meaning that from you hit the power button until you have the system ready are only 11 seconds on this system.

    --
    echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
    1. Re:It will also "start to boot" Linux in 1 Second! by David+Jao · · Score: 2, Informative

      But there is no special relationship between this bios and Windows 7, meaning that Linux can't also start-to-boot in 1 second!

      The Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 is going to start up in 10 seconds, meaning that from you hit the power button until you have the system ready are only 11 seconds on this system.

      Indeed, 20 seconds to boot is not "incredibly short" by any means, unless you've been trapped in Windows for so long that your standards have lowered. Fedora has been at the 20 second mark for a while now. On "retrofitted" platforms (similar to what is used in the article), Linux has achieved five second boot times.

      It's worth noting that in the Linux world, "Done booting means CPU and disk idle" as per Arjan van de Ven, whereas in the Windows world your computer is still loading up services and anti-virus programs even after you get to the desktop. So Linux is booting up faster despite measuring itself against a tougher standard. Hmm...

      This whole thing is a non-story except to sufferers of inferior operating systems. The so-called "incredibly short" boot times are merely normal on alternative operating systems, and have been for quite some time.

    2. Re:It will also "start to boot" Linux in 1 Second! by Hurricane78 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Actually there is a relationship. It's called a "marketing deal". Phoenix and Microsoft promote their work in combination, expecting "bigger than the sum of its parts" effect out of it.
      Apparently it worked, seeing how some people here think it's really great that an OS boots in freakin' 10 seconds. When Coreboot with Linux does it literally in 3.

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    3. Re:It will also "start to boot" Linux in 1 Second! by AndrewNeo · · Score: 3, Funny

      Hey, now, nobody asked for a car analogy just yet!

  6. I don't understand the obsession... by IANAAC · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I don't understand the obsession with short boot times.

    Most of us keep our machines running all the time. I would think a quicker return from suspend or hibernate would be more useful.

    1. Re:I don't understand the obsession... by petes_PoV · · Score: 5, Insightful
      And if a PC booted in sub 1-second, more people would switch off and stop wasting power - and then marvel at the savings they make.

      The two reasons for ever-on PCs is either when the user doesn't like to wait the (in my case) minutes for the boot sequence to run through: whether that's Linux or Microsoft, it's far too long.
      The second reason is when they're running stuff in that background: a server or data collection, or just a long download,. Obviously in this case, faster booting won't help but ignoring these power-users (which is probably a big proportion of the /. base, so there's no need to identify yourselves - I get it), if it gets a few million more PCs turned off then it's a good thing.

      --
      politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
    2. Re:I don't understand the obsession... by klapaucjusz · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Most of us keep our machines running all the time.

      Yes, we do, and that is wasteful. With faster boot and support for wake-on-lan in routers, we could be making significant energy savings.

      I would think a quicker return from suspend or hibernate would be more useful.

      Returning from hibernate performs a full hardware boot (including BIOS POST) -- hibernate merely restores the user-space memory from disk.

    3. Re:I don't understand the obsession... by xouumalperxe · · Score: 2, Informative

      The two reasons for ever-on PCs is either when the user doesn't like to wait the (in my case) minutes for the boot sequence to run through: whether that's Linux or Microsoft, it's far too long. (...)

      Getting the the boot sequence to go down to a few seconds is a great step forwards, but after that I still need the following applications open: Mail, Browser, Media Player (and possibly a couple more, depending whether it's the work computer, home desktop, or home laptop). Plus having those apps' sessions just right.

      A good sleep implementation allows you to easily pick up where you left off, which is still a serious advantage.

    4. Re:I don't understand the obsession... by xtracto · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A good sleep / hibernate implementation that doesn't use much (or any) power would be indistinguishable from hyperfast booting.

      You do know that the hibernate (suspend to disk) function does not require any power (once the computer enters in hibernation state).

      What we need is very fast hibernation algorithms implemented in fast non-volatile memory such as Flash or MRAM.

      --
      Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
  7. Combine it with Moblin by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Intel's Moblin boots incredibly fast. Their early prototypes got to desktop in 5 seconds. Here's a video of Moblin 2.0, possibly taking a bit longer than that but it's also probably a nicer desktop ;-)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqmuPFZ1RWo

    Moblin's aim, AFAIK, is to get you to a full *usable* desktop as quickly as possible. So unlike what Windows (unless they've improved this since XP, when I last checked!) and some Linux distros do you don't get your quickly loaded desktop bogged down by loads of services starting in the background. You get there, you're done (although you may still have to wait for the network to connect but whatever you do won't be wallowing whilst other stuff loads).

  8. Hilarious video by blind+biker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Don't take my word for it, take Microsoft's word" !!!

    I think I'm going to trust a random schmuck any day rather than Microsoft.

    --
    "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  9. Fast by Wowsers · · Score: 3, Funny

    Boot Windows in 1 second. That's got to be a record time in how frustrated people are with Windows that they want to put the boot into it THAT fast!

    --
    Take Nobody's Word For It.
  10. Highly Optimized UEFI by Bruha · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Means Apple paid Intel to mangle it so it will not boot OS X. Is it any wonder that no EFI motherboards are on the market?

  11. Fast BIOS done before. by xlotlu · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is hardly some major breakthrough.

    Asus came up with a nice hack on their EeePC dubbed "Boot Booster". It dumps the system state right after POST on a HDD partition, and on subsequent boots it reads that straight into memory, so you have 1-second "POSTs" going straight to the bootloader.

    And then you have coreboot, which is as fast as the machine it runs on: without taking any shortcuts, it can do all the grunt work in 3 seconds or so.

    Maybe the breakthrough is Windows booting fast, but that's a different story.

  12. Re:moderation goof by EdZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    After running Windows 7 for a while, one of my favourite things has been not needing to restart for installing updates. I've gone weeks on Vista with the "please restart to complete updating" message popping up periodically because it's just too much hassle to note down everything I have open and arranged, pause or cancel any running operations (if possible), then restart everything afterwards. This can take a good half an hour start to finish, which usually gets traded for half an hour of doing something useful. Hopefully, this should at least mean more people will keep Windows 7 up to date, even if it's just that average users will never even notice the automatic update process and thus never get annoyed and turn it off.

  13. Ubuntu 9.10 + SSD = 5 seconds boot by Graftweed · · Score: 4, Informative

    For the record, the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 already boots in 5 seconds using a SSD.

  14. Re:moderation goof by maxume · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I reboot XP about once a month. I guess it helps me that I am not a complete idiot (obviously, by using Windows at all, I must be some level of idiot), but I don't think there are all that many people rebooting Windows multiple times per day.

    I often do stupid things like ignoring automatic updates for several weeks at a time (if none of them are fixes for remote exploits of software that I use, where's the hurry?).

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  15. Re:Boot logo is nice but? by Shikaku · · Score: 2, Informative

    How to get Fast Boot Times (OS Independent, but I've never done this with MacOSX)

    Step One: If you bought a ready made computer with Windows and you want Windows, format and reinstall Windows clean with the Windows CD that came with it and defragment it, or install your choice of OS. Vendors install crap that will slow everything down, and you should just start clean. Remember to keep a backup of working drivers (if needed)!

    Step Two: Disable all unneeded services. In Windows you do this from the Control Panel. In Linux use a Boot-Up manager, like bum, or edit the bootup scripts manually; readahead can also be helpful.

    Step Three: Make sure you delete all unneeded applications if possible, and disable all startup applications not needed at startup. This goes along step two but it's more about desktop programs loading. Running msconfig for Windows and editing the startup applications, you can stop programs you don't want from loading.

    Step Four: This is more preventative measures. Don't install crap you don't need. In Windows installing any program permanently slows down Windows (this is why I mentioned just formatting the Windows computer and reinstalling Windows). This has to do with the registry. In *nix this is not an issue if handled correctly. Usually if it isn't handled correctly your system becomes unusable either way.

  16. Beeting by camperdave · · Score: 5, Funny

    From a helpdesk point of view, they'll suffer one heck of a beeting everytime it goes down...

    Arg! Support says the server's down again. Let's throw beets at them!

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    1. Re:Beeting by Tetsujin · · Score: 2, Funny

      From a helpdesk point of view, they'll suffer one heck of a beeting everytime it goes down...

      Arg! Support says the server's down again. Let's throw beets at them!

      Crap! They've retreated to higher ground, I can't throw a beet all the way up there! ...Maybe if I crouch for a few seconds until I start flashing, then I'll be able to jump up there! ...Aw, hell... I didn't hit them with the beet! I guess I'll just have to wait here until they throw something at me that I can grab and throw back at them.

      --
      Bow-ties are cool.
  17. My computer boots in less than 2 seconds by RonMcMahon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How ironic it is that my 25 year-old Commodore 64 still blows the pants off what is touted as 'fantastic' today. Even my Atari 800 boots in less than a second. My MacBook 165 boots in about 8 seconds and powers down in 2... I have an HP DV8000 notebook running Windows 7 that boots in 'just minutes' ahh progress...sometimes you CAN beat it.