Embedded Linux Achieves One-Second Boot Time

Sam writes "A new goalpost has been set in the race for faster bootup times. MontaVista Software announced (and demonstrated at the Virtual Freescale Technology Forum) a dashboard application going from cold boot to operational in one second flat on their embedded Linux platform. Although this is unlikely to immediately benefit your average Linux user, previous real-time patches have eventually made their way into the main kernel."

Nice text color

[lpcustom]

That site should just switch to white text. It's like everyone keeps going a shade lighter. Apparently they are racist and have something against black.

Re:Not needed

[maxwell demon]

A computer sitting idle needlessly consumes power. A computer switched off doesn't.

Re:Not needed

[Abreu]

I'll bite.

Some of us want to run laptops, netbooks and other devices where the ability to shut down completely and then turn on quickly, using zero battery in the meantime would be very useful.

Re:Awesome!

[BrokenHalo]

Yeah, but you know you're really cool when you have no idea how long it takes to boot your machine. After all, you only do it once. ;-)

Completely overrated and someone else did it first

[synthesizerpatel]

I'm working as an embedded driver software engineer and setup our company's OpenEmbedded build system to provide an end-to-end build environment for our embedded offering and while I can't find the link at the moment -- the one second boot time has been done before and was posted on TI's OMAP developer site a while ago. If I remember correctly it's mostly about U-Boot and how it copies the kernel into memory (byte by byte as opposed to streaming it) which is where you get the majority of your time decrease.

Either way, MontaVista is not the first on this one and it's a shame they're pretending they are.

The one second boot time is also never going to benefit regular PCs as they achieve it due to the nature of embedded systems -- you build a distro for your specific hardware which means no probing, none of that BIOS junk. No looking for the 'first' boot device.. U-Boot can be configured to automatically jump to the booting phase so you're already faster there. Beyond that, load and decompress your kernel (it'd be faster if your kernel wasn't compressed too wouldn't it?)..

So, chalk this up to having a kernel built specifically for your hardware and a boot-loader that is set to only boot one way, ever.