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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.
Microsoft has a new report showing MS-DOS booting in less than 1/2 a second with an average laptop...
Apple has released a similar report showing Mac OS Classic booting in 3/4 a second, but with a cooler shiny logo.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Wow, their webserver sucks.
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/
Eat that Microfags.
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)
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!
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.
Isn't the phrase "LCD Display(liquid crystal display display" as redundant as the phrase "hot water heater" and "atm machine"?
Slashdot, downstairs in my house has a major ant problem. Luckily I reside upstairs. Nevertheless, once every 5 minutes or so an ant comes trotting along my desk. First I place a coin or another object in its path. This confuses the ant, causing it to run off in a different direction, but my finger is waiting. I block its path with my finger. It runs in the opposite direction, but I anticipate this. Soon the ant is encircled by pens and other barriers, and if it attempts to climb them, swift punishment is issued. The ant remains in my arena. Then I take my knife, and nimbly place the tip onto one of its legs, holding it in place, then I press down hard and chop the leg off. The ant does not run, it merely enters a craze moving all around wildly. I allow it to suffer like this for a minute or so, chopping off another leg if it appears not to be in pain. Then comes a decision. Sometimes I will wait for another ant, and place it in the arena to see what it does. Occasionally it will pick up its comrade, and run off, but this is an offense punishable by death. Other times, I will merely watch the ant until it gives up. It will stop moving all but one leg. At this point I give in and slice the ant in two, putting it out of its misery. I save the corpses in a small pile, and once I have a considerable stack, I scatter them in my arena. This is where the real fun begins.
I venture outside to my back yard and find a red ant. This is my gladiator. I return to my room and place him in among the corpses. He wanders, confused. I do not let him leave. I pound the desk near him with my fingers, scaring him. I toughen my gladiator up until another ant comes along. I place the intruder into the arena. The red ant will go after the black ant, and they engage in mortal combat. If the red ant wins, another corpse decorates my arena. If the black ant vanquishes his foe, he wins the prize of life. I carry him in my hands and bring him downstairs and place him among his comrades. If he put up a good fight, I give him a warriors welcome and feed his colony with bread. If he barely defeated the red ant, he receives no food, only the gift of life. This is how i spent my afternoons.
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.
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.
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?
Most linux users have to reboot their computers about as many times as they have been laid.
"I like it when the red water comes out.."
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.
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.
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.
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!