From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sat Nov 16 2002 - 03:00:10 MST
On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, spike66 wrote:
>
> >Can someone explain to me why, on a 2 GHz computer,
> >it *still* takes over a minute to boot? In those
Because the BIOS is an idiot, there is so much to initialize, and because
the OS is a leviathan from hell. There is no need for an OS core in a node
to have more than a few kBytes.
> >100 billllllion clock cycles, please someone tell
> >me exactly what the hellllll is going on in that
> >operating system?
LinuxBIOS has boot times of seconds (despite being a bit larger than a few
kBytes, in fact a stock kernel on one of my machines is almost 3 MBytes of
compressed code).
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios/news/index.html
2/15/01: 3 second boot on BX system
Tyson Sawyer writes:
I've got my BX system on the network and with a login prompt in 3 seconds
now. I am using an initrd image and kernel stored in the 2Meg BIOS flash.
I can also boot an alternate kernel image and mount and IDE disk, but that
takes more like 8-12 seconds as it isn't as stripped and I suffer about a
3 second delay to initialize the IDE system.
I can choose between the two images/filesystems with a button attached to
the southbridge.
Cheers! Ty
> It's not the processor, it's your hard drive that is limiting your
> boot up speed. Hard drive latency is still measured in *milliseconds*,
> which is a factor of 10^6 slower than any x86 chip on the market.
>
> >human history? Will we eventually see multi-terahertz
> >personal computers that still take 2 minutes to boot?
>
> Don't worry, the dual Sun server that we have at work can take in excess
> of 10 minutes to boot. But, you only do it once or twice in a year...
The concept of booting itself is idiotic. Why do we have to boot? Because
we upgrade hardware, or because the system has crashed or suffered a power
outage. Modern Unixes have uptimes of years (then usually the machine
dies, or needs to be upgraded), and there is hot-pluggable hardware.
Even if we switch the power off, with MRAM a system should be up in
seconds. In ms, if the hardware is not complete braindead, and needs to be
reinitialized from scratch.
Do we need to have such conversations (and the ones about Bill Gates being
a knight in shining armor, and the inventor of all general good ness in
computing there is)? On this list, I mean?
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