Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 3:15 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
In reply to: Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica) by ajft
Parent article: Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

A better question might be "what's up with this *resistance* to good boot times based upon some misdirected notion that Linux never has to be rebooted because we happen to have done well in certain areas?

Like it or not, we live in "The Real World" where we end up rebooting either more often than we need to, out of caution... less often than we should, out of pride... or more often than we want to, out of undesired necessity.

That said, that whole recent discussion on LKML about bringing back the once on, once off, replaced by udev, devfs fell pretty flat when one considers its reliance on the "boot time" argument as its stimulus.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 5:35 UTC (Thu) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link]

Also, the quest for shorter boot times has exposed some Linux performance bugs and been an impetus for better performance measurement tools. Ultimately the boot-time competition may help improve Linux performance in the steady state as well as at boot time.

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 10:58 UTC (Thu) by prl (guest, #44893) [Link] (1 responses)

Seconded. The Unix workstations that I recall from the early 90s booted quicker than many systems now - despite processors that are 1000 times faster. One of the main problems is that we have been conditioned by BIOSen and Windows to expect that boots take a long time. Clearly they don't need to - but expectations have been lowered so that even our 3 year-old DVD recorder takes 20 seconds to start up, which is about 4 times longer than the VCR it replaced. Utterly ridiculous.

On the Linux front, it does appear that some applications have become lazy about how long it takes to boot up even simple configs. I reboot often enough that I would prefer not to lose the time. But one excellent reason is good PR - I very much want Linux newbies to see a 10 second boot. They should be impressed from the first minute.

I hope that wider support of coreboot (LinuxBIOS as was) will help here, as well as the new ARM netbooks (which don't need legacy BIOSen).

Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

Posted Jun 11, 2009 14:12 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]

Are you sure about that one? I remember SPARCstations that took half an hour to boot, and would dwell at the ridiculous Sun X11 splash screen for an interminable interval. I remember DEC Alpha workstation that could even make it out of the firmware in a minute, much less fully booted.

DOS on a Pentium, *that* was a smoking fast boot.