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Toward Faster Boot

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Roedy Green

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Oct 18, 2009, 7:43:41 PM10/18/09
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Consider someone who does transcription. She arrives at a lecture.
They don't let her in more than a few minutes before the lecture
starts. The AC-powered laptop with aux screen takes so long to boot
up, she misses the initial part of the lecture.

Back in the DOS days, Abundance apps could freeze themselves as a RAM
image for instant restart. Boomerangs could snapshot RAM on seeing
power failing and restore it when it returned, picking up where you
left off.

Could we have something like this for modern machines for fast boot?

What would have to change in the OS?

What would have to change in Java?

I was distressed to read in a Toronto Globe & Mail review that Windows
7 is even slower to boot than Vista.

Windows needs to reboot for even minor software changes. This would
not help that.

You could think of this as a green measure to conserve power without
inconveniencing the user. It seems to me it should be not that much
more difficult to pull off than suspend mode. In both you have to
quiesce all i/o.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris.
~ Orville Wright (born: 1871-08-19 died: 1948-10-30 at age: 77) 1908 We see that same conservative pessimism in those crafting today�s computers and computer tools. They are overwhelmed by the details of producing even today�s solutions. You need young, over-confident people who don�t know too much to chart the course ahead. This is especially true of global warming where the current generation has entirely given up hope of a green planet and sustainable human survival.

Sabine Dinis Blochberger

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Oct 19, 2009, 4:57:53 AM10/19/09
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Roedy Green wrote:

> Could we have something like this for modern machines for fast boot?

Boot from a solid state disc (SSD), and only include the bare essentials
on startup. Also change hardware detection to fixed (built-in). Use a
regular disc for user and application data.

All these can be done with GNU/Linux. Windows is not for you if you need
(fast) availability.

My Palm m5 "boots" instantly. It does not have anything fancy, but if
you want to take notes, it's perfect. You could look into how Palm
solved the issue. Battery life is not an issue here, but then it does
not have WiFi or Bluetooth. It has infrared or the cradle if you need to
zap a file to another device.

John B. Matthews

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Oct 19, 2009, 10:57:22 AM10/19/09
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In article <L-idndJ0yNKMt0HX...@novis.pt>,

Sabine Dinis Blochberger <no....@here.invalid> wrote:

> > Could we have something like this for modern machines for fast boot?
>
> Boot from a solid state disc (SSD), and only include the bare essentials
> on startup. Also change hardware detection to fixed (built-in). Use a
> regular disc for user and application data.

Recent versions of Ubuntu and Fedora have modern JDKs in the
repositories, and it's possible to create your own distribution. You can
even use a USB flash drive:

Ubuntu: <http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1062799>
Others: <http://www.pendrivelinux.com/>

> All these can be done with GNU/Linux. Windows is not for you if you
> need (fast) availability.

[...]
--
John B. Matthews
trashgod at gmail dot com
<http://sites.google.com/site/drjohnbmatthews>

Lew

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Oct 19, 2009, 8:44:44 PM10/19/09
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John B. Matthews wrote:
> Recent versions of Ubuntu and Fedora have modern JDKs in the
> repositories,

for example,
<http://openjdk.java.net/>

--
Lew

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