Slashdot Mirror
The 1-Second Linux Boot
An anonymous reader writes "Less than one second Linux boot! This video shows an OMAP3530 capturing video data from a camera and rendering it to an LCD display — the video appears on the LCD display in less than a second from reset."
Guess Linux is faster than Slashdot.
Posted from Linux, but surely I have failed.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
... is Large and in Charge.
Don't worry, it will be back in a second.
They should reboot it between requests.
For a 1 second boot, it takes a 2.5 minute video to demonstrate it.
Search for MontaVista and you can likely find the video. TheRegister has it as well.
Complete with a video:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/14/montavista_boasts_1sec_linux_boot/
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/07/linux-achieves-1-second-boot.html
http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/linux-1-second-boot-demo-15-07-09/
YouTube - One Second Embedded Linux Boot Demonstration (new version)
i don't give a fuck how fast an os boots if it can't run my apps. without my apps i have no use for a computer.
my commodore 64 probably boots faster but it doesn't make it the best machine for the job.
It must have been his first time.
An OS optimized for a single platform being loaded uncompressed from ROM (or in this case flash) is nothing special. Heck, many of the computers of 30 years ago booted up in a second or two for the same reasons.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
This is a linux computer in a car that has very specific hardware and limited functionality. Wake me up when you can get a true desktop machine to boot in 1 second and then we can talk. This is like saying, "My toaster runs linux and it can boot instantly!" Big freaking deal.
does it run crysis?
Ok, so that is interesting, but only just... This isnt desktop Linux so Im not sure why you are saying "eat that".
The OS is DMAed directly into system memory. Ok, thats kind of spiffy. That means its been "pre-loaded" which is already located.
Let me put this in perspective. Back in the mid 90s I worked at AMD. On the ÉlanSC520 system on a chip (133mhz 486 class):
So, this really isnt that spectacular - cool yes, ground breaking no.
-Foredecker
Jibe!
"You're"
Apart from the “because I can”, what’s the actual point of this?
I mean restarting the computer is rather a Windows thing. Why would you reboot a Linux machine? There isn’t a new kernel that often...
If it’s a desktop, you are going to switch it on in the morning, go take a piss, enter the password, go find something to eat, and then it runs for the day. Same thing when you were away and came home.
And for anything else (e.g. laptops) there always is hibernation.
Also the trick to make shutdown actually reboot and go to hibernation, helps with doing actual reboots.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Where's the very relevant word embedded in the Slashdot title? Even TFA's author was honest enough to include it in the original title.
I just bought a cheap digital TV that takes almost 5 seconds to boot. Sad.
An honest man at Slashdot.
I guess god will not destroy us today.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ya know, trying to be all cool and insulting someone *really* doesn't work when YOU'RE not able to have a proper command of the language YOU'RE using... it just makes you look like an ass. Try again after you've gotten some education...
Let me check in my encyclopedia reference, I just need to find the CD disc.... oh nevermind, doesn't work in my kde desktop environment anyway, I'll just check the wikipedia...
It's either false dichotomies, or the terrorists win, you decide.
Haha Made me LoL.
Will probably be back down in a sec too though.
What I've never quite understood is why most operating systems boot every time like it's the first time. If you look at most operating systems, they run a bunch of scripts, initialize a bunch of things, thrash the hard drive with random read and/or write patterns, and end up.. at exactly the same state every time. Why not just capture that state, and restore it?
If you think about it, the only differences between typical boots are:
- The date & time
- The type of boot (hibernation or cold boot)
- Some USB type devices that may have been plugged in or unplugged
- Minor logging events ('successful boot', 'need an fsck/chkdsk', etc...)
Really, all of that work can be done in milliseconds, not minutes. Operating systems should just read the ~100MB "ready for use" image from a nice contiguous section of the disk, write it straight into memory, and then do a quick sanity check for changed hardware.
A typical desktop SATA drive can read at 50MB/sec sequentially, so this should take, what, 2 seconds at most? On a good SSD, it should be 500ms!
I have a high-end laptop with a good SSD, and it still takes 46 seconds to go form "pressed the power button" to "logged on and usable" with Windows 7, and I suspect it wouldn't be much better with Linux.
The CPU utilization of typical machine booting in a VM with a very fast disk or SSD behind it is interesting to watch. It takes several seconds of 100% CPU time to boot either Windows or Linux. If you think about it, there's no useful computation that the OS can possibly be doing before it's booted. That's 100% wasted time.
Of that time, 800 ms are spent just stabilizing the clocks.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Way to spoil the ending of the new Zelda game.
In Soviet Russia - Linux boots you!
...That found it ironic that the name of the company that appears to specialize in Linux solutions has the word "Vista" in the name of the company? I mean, how old are these guys? was this planned?
This is nothing really new. In fact, they boot slower on a faster processor than earlier acheivments. This is mostly an ad for MontaVista.
See http://elinux.org/Main_Page for a lot more information om bootup.
I think the record is about 200ms by Sony.
Really not so much.
Deleted
Typically the only reason my linux machines get rebooted is precisely because the hardware HAS changed. Or the kernel has. What other reason can there be to reboot?
And as for your assertion that linux wouldn't be any better, I get a cheap netbook with a joke SSD and it boots faster. (Aspire One ZG5)
Windows boot time is not entirely fair however, it tries to do a lot of things. People think that all a computer does is draw a desktop, but to get all that in order a lot of hardware has to be configured and this includes dealing with delays. For instance spinning up the HD's and allow them time to report. There is often even a bios setting to allow extra delay's so slower hardware has time to respond.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
14:33:25 up 26 min, 2 users, load average: 1.39, 1.04, 0.50
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
I build little embedded(ish) systems myself - AMD Geode boxards (ALIX) and my custom compiled kernel boots in 1.08 seconds (according to kernel output) If I didn't compile in networking and USB, I'm sure it would be under a second.
The biggest time is the boards BIOS (5 seconds), then loading the image off flash then the kernel uncompressed and boots - 1.08 seconds.
If I had more access to the board and had 4MB of flash ram as part of the memory map, then I could eliminate the long BIOS + Load times and jump into kernel on cycle 0. That's where the trick is, I guess - a fast load of the kernel into RAM, or keep it in FLASH that's part of the memory map.
After the kernel is loaded it's just userspace - I run a cut-down system, but it still takes another 15-20 seconds or so to get time, dns, networking, apache, etc. going. You're probably not doing that with an in-car device or a camera, etc.
So it's not really hard to make a kernel boot fast and possibly even launch one application - the big savings are going to be on the hardware when you can eliminate BIOS and load times, and the amount of userland you then have to load - which is the real difference between "embedded" and general purpose (e.g. desktop)
This one second booting will be perfect for ATM machines, so you don't have to wait to enter your PIN number.
Now where did I hear something like that? Oh yeah here. Funny how every thread here on /. has at least one section where this would fit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Could the Swiftboot people consider making Ubuntu boot in 1 second? Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet
...don't know how good you got it. The first computer I learned to boot was a PDP-8 with no boot rom. The only mass storage medium was punched paper tape. Booting consisted of setting the front panel switches so that the first few bytes of RAM contained a program that said "read the paper tape and execute it". Then you loaded the OS tape into the reader, prayed that it wouldn't jam or tear, pressed a button and waited a couple minutes.
gotta run it in wine if you gotta have windoze. appropriately named but misspelled, I'm certain they had whine in mind. Besides, Linux users don't need an encyclopedia, we already know it all. :)
WoW.... it is cool... damn cool.. mind blowing.
now, lets get over it....
What's the big deal? Is it because someone made a video, and NOW you can understand?
I've been using a couple of WinCE portables that boot instantly for almost 10 years.
They support a version of MS Office, but I use them primarily for browsing, email and Google apps.
They were made by Sharp and I got them on sale for $100 each.
The netbook is NOT a new concept!