Boot Windows Vista In Four Seconds 326
arcticstoat writes "Asus' budget motherboard wing, ASRock, claims that it's found a way to load a clean boot of Windows from a full shut down in just four seconds, using its new Instant Boot technology. The technology takes advantage of the S3 and S4 features of ACPI, which normally enable the Sleep/Standby and Hibernation modes in Windows respectively. However, by calling them at different times in the boot-up and shutdown process, Instant Boot enables you to boot up to your Windows desktop in three to four seconds, even after a proper shut down. Two modes are available; Fast mode, which uses S3 and boots up in around four seconds, and Regular Mode, which uses S4 and apparently takes between 20 and 22 seconds to boot. The advantage of Instant Boot when compared with normal Sleep and Hibernation modes is that you get the advantage of a clean boot of Windows, without what ASRock calls 'accumulated garbage data,' and you also get the security of knowing that you won't lose any data if there's a power cut and you lose AC power. There's also a video of it in action at the link above."
Cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if something like this could be done with Linux now that 2.6.27.5 has been out for a few days and that situation with the RESET_REG_SUP bit has been resolved. This certainly is great news for Vista users looking for a new board.
Re:Heh... It's using the Hibernate functionality.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My guess as to how it's done... (Score:3, Interesting)
I fail to see how what they've done is a bad thing. And I don't think it's quite as easy to script, since you'd have to reconfigure how windows works. If you have an inkling of how to do this in a smooth automated fashion, please do tell me.
Big question is, if you pull the cord, does it maintain state? Or will that require a "cold boot"?
Re:Heh... It's using the Hibernate functionality.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You can't have both (Score:2, Interesting)
I haven't seen any evidence of this. Plus, that wouldn't be something you could do from a motherboard.
What's your explanation for the fast boot? The warning about not powering off is clearly because it's keeping the ram powered, exactly the same as ordinary S3/standby.
Re:You can't have both (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, (sorry about another post) they couldn't advertise "not worrying about losing your data if there is a power cut" if the image was taken straight after boot, because it wouldn't have any of your data in it, just OS stuff.
Re:Not quite as useful as it seems at first glance (Score:2, Interesting)
Not quite as useful as it seems at first glance...
You're absolutely right: it only works for about 95% of home users out there (a conservative estimate). Now, if it booted Linux as well, then it would be useful!
Re:ASRock is not ASUS (Score:1, Interesting)
Who's "we" ?
Cheating... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is still cheating - it's first of all not actually booting but suspending/resuming (albeit smartly).
Most importantly the system is not actually shut down, so it still draws power to refresh the memory. This will likely suck on high-performance laptops where the large amounts of ram with high voltages will suck the battery dry in a substantially short time.
And worse, this technology will take a _long_ time to shutdown. It's sacrificing a lot. We can (really) boot+shutdown a linux box in +- 10 seconds. Would you want a 3 second boot if your shutdown time becomes one minute?
For people who are on the go a lot and tend to open/close their laptops a lot, this may actually reduce their effective work time a lot.
Re:Cool. (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually, the hibernate had better occur before mounting filesystems, including root, or you'll have a trashed filesystem on your hands. You could probably use a switchroot to get the updated root filesystem on return from the hibernate.
Re:Cool. (Score:4, Interesting)
You are not quite right.
The fast mode Linux equivalent is to have init suspend the system right before the log-on prompt every time you boot. Then to "shutdown" your computer you actually reboot it. It ends up in S3 sleep stage. When you arive at your computer to use it, you "turn it on" by unsuspending it.
The other method works EXACTLY the same as the fast mode outlined above, but has init hibernate the computer, rather than suspend it on each boot.
No, really, this is clever... (Score:4, Interesting)
What it looks like they're doing:
1. They're taking a snapshot of the system that was made when you hibernated, and restoring that snapshot.
2. Next time you shut down it restores the same snapshot you made the first time, after your original clean boot.
The only real issue I see is that your file system cache (and any other file system state) now contains garbage, and will need to be invalidated (NOT FLUSHED). If the cache was left out of the original snapshot then just remounting the file system from scratch should solve that. This isn't really booting (you'll need to repeat the whole process after just about any time you modify system state, including a lot of things like registry changes), but it's also not specific to Windows and should DTRT with Linux, etc...
Re:S3? S4? What is this of which you speak? (Score:3, Interesting)
S3 is about as fast as opening the lid of your Macbook, after you've closed it without shutting down.
S4 is about as fast as powering up your Mac from scratch ;-)
Re:Heh... It's using the Hibernate functionality.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Really? The OS can force my motherboard to support S3 and S4?
Re:My guess as to how it's done... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course you can get the same effect yourself by rebooting then just putting your machine to sleep when you want to shutdown. Someone could probably even write a simple software solution for this rather than requiring a whole new motherboard.
Hmm. It seems like it'd be really easy to do this with an open source OS. I think I may have just found a nifty little project for this weekend. All it should take is:
At that point "sudo init 7" should cause your machine to shut down to "instant boot" state. Hitting the power button will then "instant boot" it.
"sudo init 0" or "sudo init 6" will do a normal shutdown or a normal reboot.
The final step would be to modify the "shutdown" command to go to runlevel 7 when given some new option, and then to modify the GUI-based shutdown tools to provide the instant-boot option as well, and maybe make it the default. Oh, and maybe modify the ACPI script that's executed when the power button is hit so that the power button does a "shutdown to instant boot" by default.
Pretty easy. Of course, in Linux I don't ever see any reason to shut the machine down anyway. My laptop pretty much only gets rebooted when there's a kernel update to install. Other than that, it just gets suspended. So, kind of pointless in Linux, but easy. The same would apply to *BSD.
It's been done in 5 seconds.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if something like this could be done with Linux now that 2.6.27.5 has been out for a few days and that situation with the RESET_REG_SUP bit has been resolved. This certainly is great news for Vista users looking for a new board.
It's been done in 5 seconds..
Doesn't even require a special motherboard, they did it by modifying Fedora on a EEE pc (something not known for it's speed)
http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ [lwn.net]
Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/arjanintel [youtube.com]
Re:It's been done in 5 seconds.. (Score:3, Interesting)
After reading how the implementation in windows is done by doing pre-hibernation, it makes the Linux method look even more impressive. They start from a clean cold boot.
Still pre-hibernation is pretty interesting.. I never shut my systems off anyhow though, I always believed that systems left on have a longer life span because the chips never cool down, but that can't be true for some of the computers moving parts..
Re:Heh... It's using the Hibernate functionality.. (Score:4, Interesting)
This used to be called "cutting part off the string on this end and tying it to the other end". The technique is sometimes useful, but in this case, what if you're also concerned about shutdown time? For instance, I sometimes shut down my laptop at the end of a meeting for various reasons. Shutdown time is important because I have to wait until it shuts down completely before closing it, else it'll suspend and then resume shutting down when I'm trying to boot it up.
Windows *already* takes too long to shut down -- I'm not sure I want to wait even longer so it can also do prework for the next boot. Instead of tricks like this, why not load less cruft at boot?
Re:You can't have both (Score:3, Interesting)
Because there is none of your data in RAM.
When you shut down, it actually reboots normally. Once the system comes back up, it automatically and instantly goes into S3 standby mode (suspend to RAM). As someone else said, you're basically making startup faster at the expense of making shutdown longer... but who cares when you just hit the button to shut down and walk away?
Since you did a proper reboot first, all your data was (presumably) saved to disk. Since it sleeps immediately after a fresh startup, there was never a chance for you to open up applications and have unsaved data in RAM.
=Smidge=
Exciting (Score:2, Interesting)
I've virtually NEVER had windows work reliably after a hibernate/resume. I acknowledge that there is probably a hardware/software combination out there that can do it, but I've never encountered one.
For me, things just get unstable, and after 2 or 3 hibernates without a full shutdown, the whole system fails (if it didn't fail on the first resume).
So although this may work on a pristine install, the thought of owning one of these after a few patches from Microsoft, installing an anti-virus and a few drivers would scare the living crap out of me.
Reliable suspend alone is the justification I used (to myself) to move to the Mac.
How about a vote? I'm willing to wager a little karma on it. If you have a similar experience, mod me up--if windows suspend/resume works perfectly for you, mod me down.
Re:get some fucking priorities (Score:4, Interesting)
Psst,
You are part of the government.
If you think you are living in an island, you are about to be surprised.
And unions have nothing to do with the current Automaker woes. Not. A. Damn. Thing.
It's upper managements fault for not preparing for the change in markets.
Parasite? what the hell are you talking about? Are you saying people shouldn't be paid for work?
God you are an idiot.
His post was not insightful, it is ignorant, emo, and self centered to the point of harm.
OTOH I should expect this from someone who can't even grasp why the current pledge of allegiance is a prayer.
ON a side note, at least we live in a society that allows you to go on and on spouting your ignorant drivel...no thanks to you.
Re:get some fucking priorities (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Proper shutdown... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ditto... popups are probably the least effective on sites that attract technology minded folks - no, they don't see the ads - it just pisses them off everytime the blocker has to prevent them.
Screen ads much, Taco?
Re:Proper shutdown... (Score:3, Interesting)
In this case it is likely true. The only way to accelerate clean boots would be to create it during shutdown, so a clean boot for standby or a clean boot for hibernation. Basically clearing memory of it's current running state and replacing it with a clean boot state and using that as the stored standby or hibernation state. Configuration changes would get messy. Far cleaner just to embed core elements of the Linux kernal straight into the CPU, you can only really do it with Linux because of course closed source immediately bars itself, because it is, closed source.
They are also just cooking with water... (Re:Video (Score:2, Interesting)
[...] I must get ASRock motherboard!"
No you don't :)
As I understand from their diagram they are, probably quietly, rebooting the system and putting it immediately into an suspend state afterwards.
So I emulated their technique with a batch file.
http://bigfatflat.net/public/fastboot.bat [bigfatflat.net]
REM *** fastboot.bat v0.1 *** 081113 :) :) Enjoy! >> Usage below...
REM
REM ASRock InstantBoot Batch-File Emulation
REM Call fastboot.bat in a link with ACPISTATE
REM Parameter S3 or S4 - fastboot.bat [S3,S4] and
REM also put into your autostart without params.
REM
REM It's a good Idea, but they are also just cooking with water *g*
REM They reboot the system and put it immediatly after the fresh boot
REM into a Standby/Hibernation state.
REM
REM So you can shutdown your computer it will be fresh booted and is in
REM waiting state for the new day.
REM
REM Because I like to automate things and I liked the Idea very
REM much, I decided to emulate it.
REM
REM The 'easy' Ideas everyone thinks after, damned that could be from me,
REM are mostly the best
REM
REM And by the way... use it on your own risk! Don't blame me if you
REM cant read and understand or are unable to use your favourite search
REM engine.
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