Moblin 2 Core Alpha

Posted Mar 26, 2009 16:29 UTC (Thu) by scarabaeus (guest, #7142)
Parent article: Moblin 2 Core Alpha

During the lengthy startup procedure of my Gigabyte motherboard, I have lots of time to think about how boot time could be shortened. For me, the main delay happens BEFORE the grub menu is displayed!

The (AFAICT) fairly simple approach would be for the BIOS to support read-ahead while it boots: As soon as the BIOS is running and the disk is ready, it can start loading into RAM a certain region of the disk, whose location was specified by the operating system before the last shutdown.

While the data is loading, the BIOS can perform the other parts of POST (i.e. those not connected to the disk and RAM). The disk can be an SSD or a regular hard disk. Ideally, the read-ahead would continue even while the grub menu is being displayed. Great happiness would ensue! ;)

Or am I missing something - are all those delays during BIOS POST really necessary? Surely it should be possible to put the HD to use in the background?

(By the way: Compliments to Intel for achieving such significant boot time improvements! At the same time I can't help wondering whether the whole technology isn't just motivated by the plan to sell lots of nice, expensive Intel SSDs with every desktop PC or mobile computer in the future... ;-/ )

Moblin 2 Core Alpha

Posted Mar 26, 2009 17:47 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

Same here. I also have a Gigabyte motherboard, and it spends around 10-15 seconds enumerating SATA devices alone. Add the standard VGA BIOS initialisation and POST, and I'd say the time spent before grub accounts for around two thirds of the total boot time.

Moblin 2 Core Alpha

Posted Mar 26, 2009 23:17 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

It isn't really necessary to spend all that time in the BIOS. CoreBoot can do it all much faster!

Except that you probably can't run that on your Gigabyte board. I see some on the list, either really old ones or a couple AMD boards.

http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards

Moblin 2 Core Alpha

Posted Mar 29, 2009 19:26 UTC (Sun) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

I don't understand why BIOS readahead would be more efficient than the bootloader is.

Get a motherboard compatible with Coreboot and run that instead. It's better in every way.