Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> And why shouldn't it boot in 5 seconds flat? Damnit! >_<

Some hardware just takes time to initialize and get polled. If you're going 
to support (for example) USB devices, you're going to be slowed down by the 
built-in time delays in the USB standard for initializing devices. I know a 
guy who works on some motherboards they use on big disk-server thingies, and 
it takes seven seconds just to get to the point where the firmware can run, 
simply initializing all the various chips and letting them stablize. They 
axed out starting the mail server, munging the keymaps at start-up, and so on.

I don't remember what it all was, but remember that hard drives, especially 
notebook drives, aren't all that fast, especially when seeking.

Oh, there's the link. Easier to find than I expected. 
http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

Ah, they're booting off solid state. Hard drives take 10 seconds. They added 
something not unlike MS's "readyboot", which keeps track of the order the 
kernel pages disk pages into memory and uses that next time to read ahead.

I've noticed that even BIOS boot times, a while back, suddenly went way 
down. A few years ago, a BIOS would take 30 or 40 seconds of fiddling around 
to initialize. Then all of a sudden, every machine I saw would be loading 
boot sectors within a seconds of power-up.  Now my new machine is almost 
that fast, except it has this annoying 10-second delay while it looks to see 
if there's a DVD in the drive.  Come to think of it, I can probably fix that 
by telling it to look for the HD first...

Given that some laptop manufacturers are putting a dedicated button on the 
machine that says "just boot enough to play a DVD", this would seem to be a 
win. :-)

I do have to giggle at some of the reddit comments, tho.
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/742dw/making_linux_boot_in_less_than_five_seconds/
"I wonder if they could do the same magic with suspend and hibernate?"
"100% chance of waking up from suspend would be enough magic for me."

"Every CPU cycle is more coal burned at the plant."
"How much coal did it cost you to post that?"
"It's too shameful to answer."


-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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