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Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

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Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#121

Post by Baeocystin »

bane wrote: post #97

All of the answers here are missing something. In the old days, the OS was often on a ROM that was simply mapped into some unified memory location. Thus the system went from a state of "off" to "ready to go" pretty much immediately. There wasn't a need to copy the data from the ROM to RAM and then execute some stuff to get into an initialized mode. If you hunt around a bit for things like "atari 800 memory map" you c…

I am still waiting for the computing world to catch up to the instant-boot, straight-to-REPL joy that was my Commodore 128.

I say that only partly tongue-in-cheek. The home machines in that era were right on the cusp; they were complex enough that you could do Genuinely Interesting Stuff with them, and simple enough that you could still hold the whole machine in your head. The instant feedback of REPL being the primary interface, and the almost zero-time cost of rebooting when an experiment didn't work out, made for a spectacular tool for self-learning.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#122

Post by distances »

gambiting wrote: post #15
scarejunba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because no one turns anything off anymore so the selection pressure is gone.

So I'm not so sure about that. When I complained recently about sleep issues on my windows 10 desktop I was met with an overwhelming "but....why are you sleeping your desktop? Just switch it off like a normal person?".

Indeed. I've no idea if sleep works on my desktop. I've never tried.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#123

Post by weinzierl »

argimenes wrote: post #16

When I was in high school their Amiga would cold boot into a GUI within 3 seconds. It was the same for the Acorn Archimedes in the UK. These computers had the entire GUI OS burnt into the ROM. After that I remember the shock or getting a 386 and waiting minutes for Windows 95 to load. It was like the future had died and was buried by a conspiracy of silence in the industry.

Almost the the same for me. I had a C64 and you could switch it off and immediately on again. There was no boot time but if you did it too quickly it sometimes behaved strangely. That was because there were bits and pieces of the previous RAM contents still there. The most obvious effect was remnants of the old application on the screen. So no boot time but still had to wait 3 seconds.

When I got my 386DX(ha!) I thought the boot process was so much of a hassle that I seriously believed it would just be a matter of months until that problem got fixed and newer computers would be instant on again. Oh boy was I wrong.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#124

Post by chubot »

Razengan wrote: post #117
argimenes wrote: post #16

When I was in high school their Amiga would cold boot into a GUI within 3 seconds. It was the same for the Acorn Archimedes in the UK. These computers had the entire GUI OS burnt into the ROM. After that I remember the shock or getting a 386 and waiting minutes for Windows 95 to load. It was like the future had died and was buried by a conspiracy of silence in the industry.

> It was like the future had died and was buried by a conspiracy of silence in the industry. That is exactly how I feel about many other regressions in tech! Including the promises of the internet and online gaming, or when the industry wanted to sell 3D cards but 3D games were uglier than 2D/hand-drawn games for several years..

Interoperable instant messenging too... and generally being able to move data from one application to another.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#125

Post by Theodores »

argimenes wrote: post #16

When I was in high school their Amiga would cold boot into a GUI within 3 seconds. It was the same for the Acorn Archimedes in the UK. These computers had the entire GUI OS burnt into the ROM. After that I remember the shock or getting a 386 and waiting minutes for Windows 95 to load. It was like the future had died and was buried by a conspiracy of silence in the industry.

The whole of MS-DOS was rubbish if you came from an Acorn machine, even the BBC Model B was streets ahead in terms of usable performance. Games were definitely better.

I have a revisionist view of Microsoft - I no longer believe their early products of BASIC and MS-DOS were enabling. And Windows got the world stuck in the desktop PC paradigm when mainstream computing was networked, not moving floppy disks around.

Nowadays with Ubuntu and a decent disk I don't have boot speed problems. If I want the machine rebooted then it is all up and loaded where I last left off within a minute. That includes the shutdown with web server, proxy server and networked drives to deal with. So I am asking, does everyone else have a huge boot delay? Is it really something like three minutes on Windows or Apple to shutdown and restart the machine?

Since I disabled IPV6 I don't even need to reboot - it used to start up funny after a suspend, which it does not do now, the network actually works so no reboots needed.

The other performance difference is concerning adblockers. Recently I turned off the adblocker for a website with a form I needed to fill in. Suddenly the fans were on and my machine was crawling along!

Today with free and open source software you can have a modest machine that goes at speed or you can have a paid for operating system and not turn off the adverts to have an experience akin to wading through a lake of treacle. The developer tools seem fine in open source world so I am wondering if going with Windows really is the sane and rational choice for productivity. I can understand having a Windows machine for testing and doing Windows things but for actual work the open source world just has so much more 'professional' productivity. Boot speed being an indicator of this.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#126

Post by mbell »

diego wrote: post #30

That is not a good answer. It's perfectly possible for computers to boot in a fraction of a second. The argument that computers need to go from a useless state S0 to a useful state S1 and that takes a long time is just bullshit. The question is, how close can you bring S0 to S1. This is a question of optimization. What happens is that S1 is different for different computer configurations, and processing needs to happ…

> It's perfectly possible for computers to boot in a fraction of a second.

Maybe if you are restricting to software and time from 'hardware ready', but I doubt this is possible from power application. There are a lot of hardware processes that need to take place before any real code can execute, e.g. locking clocks, memory training, etc.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#127

Post by sverige »

FrancoisBosun wrote: post #47
galfarragem wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember the day I got a new TV (despite old CRT working) for my parents and see their faces the first time time we turned it on. Now they are used but at the beggining the boot time was difficult to grasp: it used to be negligible with the obsolete tech..

There is now a boot time for my kitchen mixer… about 2-3 seconds. It’s horrible and I always forget.

Honestly, "smart" appliances are the worst idea since . . . I can't actually think of a worse idea.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#128

Post by lazyjones »

jamesissac wrote: post #88
ebg13 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it could just look at all of the input sources at the same time. And anyway, these are solid state electronics, not hamsters and flywheels. Taking seconds to send "give me electrons" and for the other side to say "here are some electrons" is bonkers.

Being able to observe all inputs sources at the same time requires extra hardware(more utilisation of the FPGA resources), considering only one input is connected to the display at a time. So it's probable that the check is sequential.

I know you’re just guessing, but if that’s what happens, why don’t they just default to the last source used and start the cycling only if nothing is detected there?

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#129

Post by lazyjones »

magicalhippo wrote: post #43
adsche wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then the questions are, why does it need to initialize? Why doesn't it start in an initialized state, what factors make it impossible to determine that initialized state beforehand and storing it? How close can we get?

As an example, consider the PCIe bus controller. Say it had some non-volatile memory so that when it powers on, it just reads the bus configuration from the NVM instead of enumerating and initializing the devices on the bus. Lots of time saved. Well that wouldn't really work without the PCIe devices also storing the configuration in NVM. If I plug a x16 device into a x4-only slot (as is typical for the third PCIe x16…

It’s smart to optimize for the common case (no hardware changes) and dumb to slow it down significantly just for this flexibility. This can’t be a major factor, vendors aren’t that incompetent.

Re: Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013)

#130

Post by Dylan16807 »

mbell wrote: post #126
diego wrote: post #30

That is not a good answer. It's perfectly possible for computers to boot in a fraction of a second. The argument that computers need to go from a useless state S0 to a useful state S1 and that takes a long time is just bullshit. The question is, how close can you bring S0 to S1. This is a question of optimization. What happens is that S1 is different for different computer configurations, and processing needs to happ…

> It's perfectly possible for computers to boot in a fraction of a second. Maybe if you are restricting to software and time from 'hardware ready', but I doubt this is possible from power application. There are a lot of hardware processes that need to take place before any real code can execute, e.g. locking clocks, memory training, etc.

Okay, how about we budget half a second for hardware and half a second for software? (assuming SSDs) How long does memory training need?
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