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

Posted Jun 11, 2009 10:00 UTC (Thu) by danpb (subscriber, #4831)
In reply to: Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica) by skitching
Parent article: Ubuntu aims for ten-second boot time with 10.04 (ars Technica)

I don't buy the argument that VMs are different from real machines in this respect. In fact you should be able to use the equivalent of hibernate-to-disk/restore for virtual machines all the time. Since it is done by the hypervisor/host it can be made to work regardless of guest OS support, and thus it can be more reliably used than hibernate in a physical machine.

The "real" machine is (or was) a VM...

Posted Jun 11, 2009 10:30 UTC (Thu) by prl (guest, #44893) [Link]

Those with long memories will recall that the idea of the BIOS was that it was a VM - so that DOS could boot without needing inconvenient drivers for multiple disk and graphics hardware. In fact I recollect that the original idea was that DOS would continue to use the BIOS calls once it had booted - but the hardware manufacturers quickly realised that this was staggeringly inefficient.

The idea was expanded to network cards (PXE) and power management (APM and then ACPI).

The poor quality of all the various implementations just shows that relying on firmware like this is not a good idea...