ARM9 board gets firmware upgrade for 0.69-second Debian boot-ups

Technologic Systems' TS-7800 ARM9 single-board computer already had quite a bit going for it with its promised 2-second Debian boot times, but the company's now gone and let loose a new firmware upgrade that cuts that down to under a second -- 0.69 seconds, to be exact. As you might expect, that time is helped considerably by being able to boot the OS (Debian Sarge, specifically) off of the board's 512MB of NAND flash, and in that 0.69 seconds you will only get a linux shell prompt and access to the Busybox file system but, still, it is an OS booted in 0.69 seconds.

[Danakin @ Jun 20th 2008 12:00PM]

holy sh*t that's fast!

[From my Cube @ Jun 20th 2008 12:11PM]

thats what she said

[JohnnyGTO @ Jun 20th 2008 12:22PM]

Ya know cube with proper medical treatment our clinic can help you with that problem.

[ddub @ Jun 20th 2008 12:55PM]

Exerpt from cube's Engadget post script:

1. Am i first? NO
2. Will it blend? NO
3. Does that's what she said apply? YES
4. Does it play doom?
5. Is it a robot set on world domination?

Fortunate for us, step 3 and 4 are not switched.

[zargon @ Jun 20th 2008 12:00PM]

I have always wanted to try out and play with these embedded systems. This could be useful for few projects I have been tossing around.

I wish I had the money to blow on something like this just to play with it. Worst case it would make a nice little desktop or maybe even laptop if I had Ben Heck like skillz.

[Andir3.0 @ Jun 20th 2008 2:56PM]

*cough* Car PC *cough*

[ishism @ Jun 20th 2008 8:07PM]

A little robitussin should take care of that.

[Richard Lai @ Jun 20th 2008 12:03PM]

It's got an FPGA! Hopefully it won't be too expensive.

[HunterXI @ Jun 20th 2008 12:05PM]

...Damn. Wish I had .69 second boot ups on OS X. Or XP, for that matter.

[ethana2 @ Jun 20th 2008 12:53PM]

I'm sure if they could handle this hardware *cough* they'd be comparable...

...and we all know how awesome and amazing the windows CLI is......

[The_Steven @ Jun 20th 2008 12:16PM]

Yes, but it's PC/104, not even PC/104+ or any of the other variants.
And don't even get me started on the price!

[Blaine Oliver @ Jun 20th 2008 12:16PM]

I think your website should be changed to:
doosh.org

thnx, go die please? Spammers suck.

[Ender Wiggin @ Jun 20th 2008 12:24PM]

Thanks for the link. I have to admit that goosh looks cool. It should be great for people without data plans on their cell phones.

[Ender Wiggin @ Jun 20th 2008 12:26PM]

Why are you low ranking him? Goosh is actually pretty useful and relevant (somewhat) to the article (the shell prompt part.) If it becomes standard practice to low rank anyone who posts a link we will all miss out on a lot of cool stuff.

P.S. I'm not related to Goosh in ANY way.

[Ender Wiggin @ Jun 20th 2008 12:27PM]

I can see why you ranked him low for the double post though. I HATE it when people post more than once in a row ;-)

[fgpx78 @ Jun 20th 2008 12:30PM]

My vista Boot in 0.69 hours. I'm proud of it.

[ethana2 @ Jun 20th 2008 12:54PM]

Most people I know have booted Vista after just 6.9 days!

[PeterF @ Jun 20th 2008 1:06PM]

Sucks for you, mine boots in around a minute, and that is perfectly acceptable since I barely ever reboot my OS since I either leave it on or put it in standby.

[Sergio @ Jun 20th 2008 3:53PM]

Same here man mine boots from cold in around 2 minutes. And 10 seconds from hibernate, 2 seconds from suspended

[stefan @ Jun 20th 2008 5:52PM]

PeterF is an environment nazi.

[rektide @ Jun 20th 2008 12:31PM]

Good job copy pasting a press relief. Thanks for not boring us with any useless info, like processor information, clock rates, power consumption, or anything else superflous. Fuck yeah, 0.69 seconds!

[ethana2 @ Jun 20th 2008 12:55PM]

A taste of what is to come in the age of the SSD.

I very much look forward to seeing Ubuntu boot off of an intel/mitron 8 GB SSD in just two seconds... :)
That's going to be amazing.

[megasquirt @ Jun 20th 2008 1:13PM]

Linux booting of those MTrons isn't anywhere close to 2 seconds for any config that has more than the absolute bare minimum support for the underlying hardware. I've done some tests on a few of the major manf.'s SSD offerings (including mtron) and boot times were only marginally faster than the 15k seagate SAS drives that I normally use.

[Andir3.0 @ Jun 20th 2008 2:59PM]

... because we all have 15K drives...

[megasquirt @ Jun 21st 2008 6:23AM]

@Andir3.0
Well, no. but if you are going to talk about SSD replacements as a performance alternative to traditional hard drives, well you are talking about devices which are quite a bit more expensive than 15k SAS drives. I think most of the units I tested were in the 800USD per 32GB drive, which is considerably more costly than the 15k spinning equivalent.

[Garth Bock @ Jun 20th 2008 1:09PM]

I want to propose the next X-Prize. We have X-Prizes for suborbital flight, moon landers and now introducing the next X-Prize.......
Develope a computer that will boot to a FULL O/S desktop with email, browser and word\spreadsheet editor in under 7 seconds. The board must not exceed 1 gig of memory, no ready boost and no overclocking but SSD drives are allowed. The computer must be a single O/S run device. This eliminates the Linux mini o/s while Windows load, devices. Anyone want to add on to the spec list ? What ya all think ? Maybe Woz would want to fund this X-Prize now that he is hanging with Kathy Griffin and hacking her iPhone.

[Benson @ Jun 20th 2008 7:27PM]

You realize how easy that is? All we need is a native build of emacs (instead of bootstrapping off another OS), and you've got it. On a quad-core Opteron, anyway.

At least I think a GB is enough; worst cse, you might need to use a version or two old for that tight of constraints...

[megasquirt @ Jun 20th 2008 1:13PM]

Busybox isn't a filesystem, it is a shell that has many common commands built in and statically linked such that it is very commonly used in recovery disks and minimal embedded linux environments. The Nokia N770,800,810 line of ITs uses busy box for example.

[Josh L @ Jun 20th 2008 2:01PM]

@ethana2:

"...and we all know how awesome and amazing the windows CLI is......"

Never used PowerShell, I see.

[Tim @ Jun 22nd 2008 5:17PM]

"Never used PowerShell, I see."

PowerShell may be a lot better than command prompt, however...

Never used one of the many Linux shells, I see.

[Neil Bradley @ Jun 20th 2008 2:41PM]

I wonder when they're starting their stopwatches. At powerup? If so, I doubt it. PLLs will take longer than that to fire up.

[Pc_Madness @ Jun 20th 2008 8:29PM]

How does getting software for ARM work? Like if I want to install PHP and MySQL in Debian, do they have to compile their own version or does Debian handle the different architecture?