SlashGear Japan
Netbooks would be a whole lot more believable as companion devices if they switched on as fast as, say, a smartphone or PDA. However the combination of Intel’s Atom and generally wheezing specs tend to make starting-up – or resuming from standby – measure more around the one minute mark than anything less. Two Intel engineers might be looking to change all that, though; at a recent Linux conference, they demonstrated an ASUS Eee PC that could boot to a Fedora desktop in just five seconds.
The secret was cutting out different boot elements that either aren’t necessary for netbook users or whose function is replicated elsewhere, the common factor between the two being that they all wasted time. Out went such fripperies as “setroubleshootd” (Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) configuration troubleshooting) which common users won’t need, and “initrd” which consumed a whole half-second but whose usable functionality was already offered by something else.
The final touch was a specially written patch that allowed read-ahead operations, based on a modified version of Fedora Readahead. That allows several things to be run simultaneously, rather than sequentially.
Even better, the Intel engineers have submitted their work to Moblin.org, the team behind the Moblin mobile development stack commonly seen on MIDs and netbooks, so we could be seeing faster start-ups for many devices. The process also apparently works on hard-drive based devices, although it takes longer than the SSD-based Eee PC; ten seconds on a hard-drive based Lenovo notebook, for instance.
[via Linux Devices]
7 Responses to “Five second boot mod for ASUS Eee PC”
The Wombat October 7, 2008
oooh – now that would be nice – I wonder if anyone has done that with the standard cut down Xandros distro that the EEE’s ship with – its pretty fast compared to most things (even my iPaq Win Mobile takes about 30 seconds to boot from cold) but 5s would be sublime.
Neutralcarmen October 7, 2008
after forays into runit and initng land i always end up back with the stock init systems (well not stock on Ubuntu, but thats another story)
theyre just not that broken.
altho normal people wont want dwm and static drivers in a monolithic kernel, im not sure you really gain much from the monolith
eg, if you break out everything into modules, do you get parallelization of hardware discovery? that seems to be the big impenetrable holdup keeping me above the 5 second barrier
NeutralJash Sayani October 7, 2008
Nice. I’d love to install Modded Fedora on my notebook if it booted in just 5 seconds !!!
NeutralJoe October 7, 2008
I never used Linux but already assumed it would start up in about 5 seconds.
-1Manish Sinha October 7, 2008
Well Joe!
No useful operating system can start in 5 seconds. If you want to use it effectively, then you would surely add some services to the startup.
This was just showcasing that if you tweak the OS, till what lower limit can you bring down the boot time. This boot time is just bare minimal.
+1Mark October 7, 2008
Now all someone needs t sort out, is a PS3 linux flash image that boots just as fast, has X and Opera in it, then I can stop using the lacklustre PS3 web browser.
NeutralBazza October 8, 2008
Five seconds!!
Not good enough.
I want it in 4secs, or less.
+1And the moon on a stick.
;-)