Eee PC modded by Intel engineers to boot in five seconds
By Nilay Patel 
posted October 7th 2008 3:43AM
posted October 7th 2008 3:43AM
Sure, we've seen projects like SplashTop boot a stripped Linux build quickly, but Intel engineers at the recent Linux Plumbers Conference took things a little farther last Thursday, starting up modified versions of Fedora and Intel's own Moblin Linux on an SSD-equipped Eee PC in just five seconds. That's all the way to an idle CPU and disk, not cheating and starting a window manager while background services thrash in the background, mind you -- and it's fast enough that the splash screen was removed from both distros. The changes are being sent back to the Moblin and Fedora trunks, but if you're curious, a detailed overview of the changes awaits at the read link.[Via SlashGear]
And further, my father can throw your father further than Brett Favre can throw, which is farther than a few furlongs, furthering the argument that father knows best.
You're my new hero :)
Five seconds??? But I want to surf the web NOW!!!!
Thank you Engadget comment system. That comment was directed below. :-/
i honestly don't really care about long boot times. i use os x, vista, xp and they are all slow booters. which always gives me enough time to roll a j. hey, it's what you make of the time you're given that counts.
amazing , cant wait until we are all booting in 5 seconds
Would this extend to the Eee Box?
It's not the Eee PC that was modded, it was the kernel and the boot process of linux that was modded. I guess it was kinda like the telephone game where the original message got a little warped. Also, here's the original news link: http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ and here's a video of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7NxCM8ryF8
Taken from my comments on otte's blog:
otte: well, for a start, he kills initrd and sticks all modules in the kernel. Which is what we used to do in 2001. There’s good reasons for going with initrd. The fact that he can get away with it on one very basic laptop doesn’t mean we can just ditch initrd. Yes, he suggests trying a big-ass kernel and falling back to initrd if it doesn’t work, but that’s an untested compromise that adds substantial complexity.
Then he uses a static /dev tree, with udev only added on top later. I am sure he has not really tested the consequences of this in a general operating environment.
Basically, what he does is cut out all sorts of shit which is, granted, not used by the most basic possible scenario (a very simple-use, single-user laptop with local authentication and not much hardware) but *is* used in plenty of other situations. And then he says “what we should do is use this extremely minimalistic system by default and try and dynamically bolt on all the other bits if they prove useful”.
Which is basically doing the easy work and grabbing the headlines, and leaving the tough work to others. It’s all very well to say “oh, yeah, we can just glue in things like network authentication if they’re needed on the system in question”, but…how? Has he done it? Has he researched how to do it? Has he looked at whether it would introduce regressions on those systems that need it?
No.
What he’s done is optimized an incredibly simple case and said “Look, it’s fast!”. Which Gentoo people have been doing for years.
It’s useful in that it shows a simple scenario can boot that fast. Great. But that’s just the opening act. There’s a ton more work to do before it can actually be useful in a general purpose distro. You can’t just sit back and say “well, look, he solved the problem, what have all you other chumps been doing for years?”
Granted this isn't very useful for a general purpose distro but for a netbook specific distrobution or even a laptop specific distrobution I think this is the way to go. "Instant on" has been the holy grail of personal computing for ages (even more so since everyone started using laptops/netbooks). It's a promising start and particularly useful for netbooks which are selling by the bucket load and as you say are "simple-use, single-user laptop(s) with local authentication and not much hardware".