Windows 8 To Feature 'Fast Startup Mode' 287
New story submitter CSHARP123 writes "Microsoft has posted details about a Windows 8 feature that is a hybrid between cold booting and waking up from a hibernated state. This feature is called fast startup mode. Gabe Aul, director of program management in Windows, explains: '[A]s in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).' The post contains a video as well, which shows Windows starting up in less than 10 seconds."
Re:so the rootkit stays alive (Score:4, Interesting)
Didn't think about that. The hibernate file doesn't have any special permissions or encryptions or something does it?
It doesn't matter if the file is protected. If you can breach the kernel, and store your malware/rootkit/etc as part of the "session 0" data mentioned in the summary, then the OS will automatically save it all for you. No need to crack the file.
However, the file does provide another vector for attack.
Boot time isn't Window's problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest problem I have when running Windows, especially in a corporate environment, is all of the crapware that doesn't start until I log in. Those are the programs that decide to do massive tasks as soon as they're started. They bog down the network connection and thrash the hard drive doing their startup scans. They make the desktop completely unusable for significant lengths of time after login.
I suppose the fast boot to a login screen is useful. I'm able to get to the login screen quickly and log in. Then I can go get my coffee and read the paper while the startup applications take forever to do whatever it is they are doing. But it still doesn't solve the core problem of having a computer that is up and useful to the end user in a reasonable amount of time.
Now, it should be obvious that the blame here is not entirely on Microsoft. They have no control over what crap the end user (or corporate IT monkeys) install on the desktop. They can't control what gets started up when the user logs in. Microsoft has no way to prevent an idiot from writing an anti-virus package that does a complete system scan (that bogs down the entire system while it's running) when it is first started by the user. There's nothing stopping a startup program from waiting for a slow network connection to time out, causing the entire startup process to basically hang. There's nothing Microsoft can do to prevent a program to rebuild it's entire search index at startup, thrashing the disk to the point where the entire system is unresponsive while it's running.
But Microsoft is not entirely blameless either. The root of the problem was the decision to make the console the central focus of operation.There is absolutely no reason why so much of the software has to start up as soon as the user logs in. There is no reason why it cannot be tied to the startup of the computer. And if that software was tied to computer startup there would be no reason it could not be identified for hibernation just like the kernel, resulting in not only a faster boot time but a faster time to actual usefulness of the desktop.
Re:Time to Usable (Score:4, Interesting)