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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.
Don't worry, it will be back in a second.
For a 1 second boot, it takes a 2.5 minute video to demonstrate it.
Complete with a video:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/14/montavista_boasts_1sec_linux_boot/
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!
Embedded systems, I suspect.
For servers and a fair few desktops, uptime is a virtue. They are rarely or never voluntarily shut down. For that reason, boot time isn't a huge issue(particuarly for servers, you are probably going to spend more time twiddling your thumbs while some RAID card spins up the drives and meditates upon infinity than you are actually booting your OS).
For laptops, suspend(ie. with RAM still live) is almost always the right thing to do(if the ACPI gods are with you and everything is likely to come out of suspend cleanly) because laptops almost always have at least a bit of power available. Only when the system is unplugged and the battery virtually dead do you need to bother hibernating to disk or shutting down. Again, boot time not a huge deal, though likely to be faster than either of the first two cases, because the hardware is more predictable and there are fewer disks to worry about.
Embedded stuff, though, particularly embedded stuff in certain consumer electronics, or in hostile, low-power environments, really needs to be able to wake up fast. When joe user turns on his digicam, he wants it to come up now, and he doesn't want it flattening its batteries keeping an image alive in RAM. When some minimalist sensor node with only a solar cell and a trickle-charged capacitor for company needs to wake up and transmit some data back to the mothership, it needs to spend as little energy as possible on booting, and as much as possible on sensing and transmitting.
Since Montavista is mostly known for embedded stuff, I assume that this is why they care.
I have to shut it down because hibernation uses the battery and I need that power to last all the way to work.
Standby uses battery to continually refresh the memory. Hibernation dumps the memory to disk and powers down. There is no battery consumption save whatever is needed to run the clock.
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.
That's not the same kind of POST.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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.
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.
Way to spoil the ending of the new Zelda game.
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.
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)
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.