You'll be happy to know we have managed to get moblin 2 boot in about 5 seconds on the acer aspire one, as well as other netbooks on the market. See our presentation on "5 second boot" on lwn.net for more information.
In the 5 second demo we had a kernel that supported pretty much all intel chipset based systems. It would be trivial (for a distribution) to make the kernel optimized in exactly the same way for a different chipset and install a specific kernel for each system. There would only be 3 or 4 kernels to distribute to cover most of the generic systems out there.
server maintainers care, because people pay them a ton of money to get a guaranteed 99.999% (extreme case, like NY stock exchanges etc.) or more uptime. That's only 5(!) minutes of downtime a year, and if you can boot in 5 seconds (and lets say shutdown in 5 as well), you can reboot 30 times a year for security updates. If you reboot in 30+30 seconds, that's only 5 reboots.
imagine having a scsi raid array which takes 1 minute to initialize. a 20+20 boot+shutdown time would give you barely 3 boots per year. A 5+5 boot+shutdown almost gives you 5 reboots in the same time.
you care for netbooks. The batteries are small, if you waste one minute at boot, and a minute at shutdown, at which the cpu and ssd (or worse: hard disk) are working hard, you lose two minutes of battery time, which translates into 5+ minutes idle or browsing the internet time. Reboot your netbook to quickly send a blog update from the airport a few times, and you've lost half an hour or effective work time.
bottom line: shorter boot (and shutdown) means more _net_ work time available, for both a/c connected and mobile devices.
This is a truly disappointing news item. Instead of setting the bar higher and truly trying to reduce boot time, they have not done much more than shave seconds off the existing boot time.
For a generic desktop distro, 20+ seconds is still terribly long. 10 seconds should realistically be easy to achieve, especially as it took Arjan and me only a few months to get to 5 seconds on a netbook. We sure cut some corners, but we did not even use ext4 on those netbooks, and we still had buggy X starting times of 1.5 seconds, something which we can probably do in 0.5 seconds with kernel modesetting.
I hate to see everyone settle down with "20 seconds" being "the next 5 second boot". This is really not progress at all, but rather, complacency.
it's a fallacy. the cost is 2 minutes of rebooting/suspending. that cost may look attractive now (because it fricken already takes forever to shutdown).
but once every computer boots normally in 5 seconds and shuts down normally in 5 seconds, would you use a mechanism like this? of course not...
This 'hack' may look cool now, but it only does because the current standards are set by the most atrocious boot/shutdown times today.
think about it: once macbooks boot and shutdown in under 5 seconds and starts to advertise it... how long do you think it will take before microsoft starts to *really* improve boot/shutdown time?
no, he's saying that the *cost* of the feature is too high for *some* of the people.
and it's not needed. This feature costs 2 minutes (for shutdown) plus 3 seconds (for boot). We can shutdown and boot a linux operating system in 5+5 seconds == 10 seconds.
So this feature is 123-10 = 113 seconds more costly.
that's 113 seconds of intensive CPU and disk activity, eating your battery away, that could have been used to browse the internet for 5 to 10 more minutes.
This is still cheating - it's first of all not actually booting but suspending/resuming (albeit smartly).
Most importantly the system is not actually shut down, so it still draws power to refresh the memory. This will likely suck on high-performance laptops where the large amounts of ram with high voltages will suck the battery dry in a substantially short time.
And worse, this technology will take a _long_ time to shutdown. It's sacrificing a lot. We can (really) boot+shutdown a linux box in +- 10 seconds. Would you want a 3 second boot if your shutdown time becomes one minute?
For people who are on the go a lot and tend to open/close their laptops a lot, this may actually reduce their effective work time a lot.
the problem is that there is no guarantee that the network is UP and RUNNING at *any* time.
please stop thinking of networking as a "requirement". Nobody in the world can guarantee that your network works at all times. You might be out of range from the next tower. You might be in a plane. Your ISP might have disconnected you because you went over your 250GB data limit:)
Modern computer OS's should work without the network being available and provide as much functionality as they can, including starting up your e-mail client in offline mode if possible. Even if the network is just slow.
It's cheating if you start cupsd, nfs, sendmail, avahi, gfsd, fuse etc etc etc all in the background after you present the user's desktop to the user (making the computer unusable for another 30 seconds). It's NOT cheating if the only thing you are doing is waiting for a DHCP response (which incedentally is what the 5-second boot demo systems do).
well, it reduces the total -port- initialization time to 0.1 seconds. the subsystem initialization (root port and bus frobbing) still take time as welll (0.2-0.4 seconds afaicr)
Slashdot Mirror
images of the latest release are here:
http://moblin.org/documentation/getting-started-guides/test-drive-moblin
You'll be happy to know we have managed to get moblin 2 boot in about 5 seconds on the acer aspire one, as well as other netbooks on the market. See our presentation on "5 second boot" on lwn.net for more information.
And yes, I have statistics and anecdotal evidence both on my side.
so where are the facts ?
the xbmc guys wrote a plugin which fixes the broken hulu support for xbmc - it uses adobe's (linux available) air sdk and works without a hitch.
too bad for boxee users. xbmc seems to be more mature as a project.
changing your mind is forbidden?
enough said for now. this is just speculation. nobody is seriously looking into dumping gtk+/gnome.
geek rednecks go away and shoot yourself, please.
must be a slow news day? wtf?
but the story of girls photographing their stuff is just too cool to not repost...
With a kernel boot time of 1 to 2 seconds (still) on most systems, there is still more time to be won :)
In the 5 second demo we had a kernel that supported pretty much all intel chipset based systems. It would be trivial (for a distribution) to make the kernel optimized in exactly the same way for a different chipset and install a specific kernel for each system. There would only be 3 or 4 kernels to distribute to cover most of the generic systems out there.
server maintainers care, because people pay them a ton of money to get a guaranteed 99.999% (extreme case, like NY stock exchanges etc.) or more uptime. That's only 5(!) minutes of downtime a year, and if you can boot in 5 seconds (and lets say shutdown in 5 as well), you can reboot 30 times a year for security updates. If you reboot in 30+30 seconds, that's only 5 reboots.
imagine having a scsi raid array which takes 1 minute to initialize. a 20+20 boot+shutdown time would give you barely 3 boots per year. A 5+5 boot+shutdown almost gives you 5 reboots in the same time.
you care for netbooks. The batteries are small, if you waste one minute at boot, and a minute at shutdown, at which the cpu and ssd (or worse: hard disk) are working hard, you lose two minutes of battery time, which translates into 5+ minutes idle or browsing the internet time. Reboot your netbook to quickly send a blog update from the airport a few times, and you've lost half an hour or effective work time.
bottom line: shorter boot (and shutdown) means more _net_ work time available, for both a/c connected and mobile devices.
This is a truly disappointing news item. Instead of setting the bar higher and truly trying to reduce boot time, they have not done much more than shave seconds off the existing boot time.
For a generic desktop distro, 20+ seconds is still terribly long. 10 seconds should realistically be easy to achieve, especially as it took Arjan and me only a few months to get to 5 seconds on a netbook. We sure cut some corners, but we did not even use ext4 on those netbooks, and we still had buggy X starting times of 1.5 seconds, something which we can probably do in 0.5 seconds with kernel modesetting.
I hate to see everyone settle down with "20 seconds" being "the next 5 second boot". This is really not progress at all, but rather, complacency.
and now you know where the US got their stupid government structure ideas from...
too bad that your code will break with the next python version.
it's a fallacy. the cost is 2 minutes of rebooting/suspending. that cost may look attractive now (because it fricken already takes forever to shutdown).
but once every computer boots normally in 5 seconds and shuts down normally in 5 seconds, would you use a mechanism like this? of course not...
This 'hack' may look cool now, but it only does because the current standards are set by the most atrocious boot/shutdown times today.
think about it: once macbooks boot and shutdown in under 5 seconds and starts to advertise it... how long do you think it will take before microsoft starts to *really* improve boot/shutdown time?
I meant to write "+/-"... so 'roughly' 5 to 10 seconds for shutdown.
no, he's saying that the *cost* of the feature is too high for *some* of the people.
and it's not needed. This feature costs 2 minutes (for shutdown) plus 3 seconds (for boot). We can shutdown and boot a linux operating system in 5+5 seconds == 10 seconds.
So this feature is 123-10 = 113 seconds more costly.
that's 113 seconds of intensive CPU and disk activity, eating your battery away, that could have been used to browse the internet for 5 to 10 more minutes.
This is still cheating - it's first of all not actually booting but suspending/resuming (albeit smartly).
Most importantly the system is not actually shut down, so it still draws power to refresh the memory. This will likely suck on high-performance laptops where the large amounts of ram with high voltages will suck the battery dry in a substantially short time.
And worse, this technology will take a _long_ time to shutdown. It's sacrificing a lot. We can (really) boot+shutdown a linux box in +- 10 seconds. Would you want a 3 second boot if your shutdown time becomes one minute?
For people who are on the go a lot and tend to open/close their laptops a lot, this may actually reduce their effective work time a lot.
ls -sSrh
much more readable and faster
so true :)
That it's Fox Television actually pushing this, being the most one-sided national news network in this nation.
why would 95% of the users take a startup penalty just because you want something that maybe 5% of users want?
don't make everyone take a startup penalty for the few people that need it.
the problem is that there is no guarantee that the network is UP and RUNNING at *any* time.
please stop thinking of networking as a "requirement". Nobody in the world can guarantee that your network works at all times. You might be out of range from the next tower. You might be in a plane. Your ISP might have disconnected you because you went over your 250GB data limit :)
Modern computer OS's should work without the network being available and provide as much functionality as they can, including starting up your e-mail client in offline mode if possible. Even if the network is just slow.
It's cheating if you start cupsd, nfs, sendmail, avahi, gfsd, fuse etc etc etc all in the background after you present the user's desktop to the user (making the computer unusable for another 30 seconds). It's NOT cheating if the only thing you are doing is waiting for a DHCP response (which incedentally is what the 5-second boot demo systems do).
this is basically the same as what upstart attempts to achieve. old idea new jacket :)
well, it reduces the total -port- initialization time to 0.1 seconds. the subsystem initialization (root port and bus frobbing) still take time as welll (0.2-0.4 seconds afaicr)