LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts

Posted Aug 30, 2010 22:31 UTC (Mon) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts by jcm
Parent article: LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts

> Why does it matter how long it takes for a cellphone to boot?

Probably not a huge deal.

But I really wish my Garmin GPS unit would boot up quicker. It's kind of annoying that by the time it's started up and gotten a satellite lock, I can be halfway to my destination. :)

LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts

Posted Aug 30, 2010 22:57 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

one situation where phone boot time could be critical.

My grandmother (92) carries a cell phone for emergancy use only, it's turned off unless she needs to make a call.

In an emergancy, I could very easily see a 1-minute boot time being critical.

now the phone she uses isn't a smartphone, but the point is that just because you leave your phone on all the time to receive incoming calls, doesn't mean that everyone will, and for those that don't, the boot time is significant.

on my laptop I don't care much about boot time, but that's because I so seldom turn it off, it goes from external power at home to external power in my turck to external power at the destination...

I don't use suspend, but I don't boot it more than once every couple of months.

LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts

Posted Aug 31, 2010 4:20 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (2 responses)

I think you answered the critical-use only situation quite well - don't get a smartphone (computer). It's not that boot time doesn't matter to anyone, but I made my comment in that way to exaggerate the absurdity of caring about boot time before everything else is fixed. There are so many other actual issues out there that matter more before that does.

LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts

Posted Aug 31, 2010 4:26 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I have mixed feelings on priorities, to a large extent speeding up boot time involves finding a way to not need to do things at boot, and that ends up paying dividends overall, not just at boot time.

Linux on Grandma's phone

Posted Aug 31, 2010 17:04 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

If the cell carriers can eke out enough additional revenue per low-end subscriber using "crapware", then the Android phone becomes the free-with-service phone, and the fast-booting phone vanishes from the market. So it's reasonable to start making Android usable for Grandma's emergency glove compartment phone now.

LinuxCon: A tale of two bootcharts

Posted Sep 3, 2010 21:13 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

But I really wish my Garmin GPS unit would boot up quicker. It's kind of annoying that by the time it's started up and gotten a satellite lock, I can be halfway to my destination. :)

Ditto, but at least it has an excuse: the world has changed every time it boots. (AFAIK, the long lock time is due to it trying different antenna configurations in order to optimize overall signal strength from the current spread of satellites. Changing its orientation while it's doing that can seriously slow it down, btw...)

Greg