Why can't computers boot instantly? (2013) • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by kalleboo » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 3:21 AM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #125

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. Now…

> 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 only reboot for OS updates (at which point the update process also runs which is much slower), I had to test this out.

My MacBook Pro running the latest MacOS, takes about 20 seconds to shut down, and then 50 seconds to boot again - including restoring the software that was running before shutdown [browser w/ tabs, IRC client, etc] since it does that before hiding the boot progress screen.

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

#152

Post by kalleboo » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 3:37 AM UTC

gruez wrote: post #60

mojuba wrote: post #8

A bigger question for me is, why can't monitors boot instantly? So annoying that a monitor that went to sleep can sometimes take 10-20 seconds longer to wake up than the computer it is attached to.

If it's really 10-20s, I'm guessing it's because it's because it's cycling through the various input sources looking for a signal.

I have auto-input select disabled since I only use my monitor with a dock. Still takes 15 seconds.

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

#153

Post by kalleboo » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 3:49 AM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #112

kerkeslager wrote: post #89

I remember when Ubuntu was first becoming popular. At the time, Windows boot times were long--I don't have timings, but my memory seems to say something like 5 minutes. And Intel processors were in the middle of their highest-energy-use period, so they ran hot , meaning you couldn't just leave your laptop on all the time. So reboot time was a significant part of my experience as a Windows user. When I first booted Ub…

> I suspect this was motivated at least in part by competition from Ubuntu. Ubuntu has such tiny market share that I strongly doubt this.

It seems just as likely it was competition from the Mac, which also at one point during Steve's reign focused on boot time

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

#154

Post by kalleboo » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

Bakary wrote: post #14

A silver lining of long boot times is that you can contemplate what you are about to use the computer for and catch yourself in the middle of a habit loop.

I bet adding a 15 second wakeup time to my smartphone would abort about 75% of my social media usage

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

#155

Post by kalleboo » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 3:58 AM UTC

tbyehl wrote: post #133

What gets me is how long servers take to reach the bootloader from power on. Your average modern Dell/HP desktop or laptop is there within a second or two, Windows 10 and systemd-based Linux distros on SSD can be at the login prompt within 5 seconds total. I haven't touched a Mac in a long time but I'd bet they're no worse. But a typical server BIOS takes 3-5 minutes do its thing. If you're lucky you might be able to…

I bought an old 1/10 Gbit managed switch for $25 on an online auction to play around with, and was surprised just how long (minutes) a switch can take to boot.

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

#156

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

gregw2 wrote: post #44

If computer makers put the OS in ROM memory rather than RAM and had a well defined way of overlaying the two so the ROM state could seem to be modified by writes to RAM, you could get instant boot. Early PCs worked that way like the Commodore64, right?

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by fulafel » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 4:44 AM UTC

Veedrac wrote: post #135

fulafel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual observed IPC tends to be 1 or less unless you are running well tuned computational workloads. And mostly software doesn't utilize multiple cores well.

Even ‘perf stat libreoffice ./somedocument.odt’ give an IPC of almost 2, and that's hardly a well-tuned computational workload. > And mostly software doesn't utilize multiple cores well. Most software sucks, that's the point of this whole conversation.

Valid correction, seems I was out of date, let's say 2 or below today. (I got 1.3-1.7 with a few libreoffice startup & command-line conversion experiments).

However during the boot process I think the IPC will be notably less, because there will be periods of waiting for disk IO and hardware initialization waits.

To zoom out, there are two dimensions here - it's good for software to run at a good IPC, but even better to do the job with fewer instructions.

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

#158

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 8:01 AM UTC

Doubl wrote: post #39

Hibernate is my preferred option when going off the computer but Windows doesn't offer it out of the box and more. You have to tweak settings. Why is that I wonder?

My understanding is that on Desktops, the default is for Sleep to do 'Hybrid Sleep' - prepare for a hibernate, but sleep instead; if you have a power failure while the computer is sleeping, you should see it waking from. The hibernate when you turn back on, instead of booting from scratch.

I know that this was the case at some point when I checked during the Windows 8 years, I don't know if this is still true.

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

#159

Post by animal531 » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

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 just built a new desktop PC (albeit with great parts) and it boots to a usable state in Win10 in just a few seconds. To be honest it's good enough to no longer worry about it.

Of course mileage on a laptop with non-quality parts will vary.

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

#160

Post by Doubl » Mon, Jun 24, 2019, 2:04 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #158

Doubl wrote: post #39

Hibernate is my preferred option when going off the computer but Windows doesn't offer it out of the box and more. You have to tweak settings. Why is that I wonder?

My understanding is that on Desktops, the default is for Sleep to do 'Hybrid Sleep' - prepare for a hibernate, but sleep instead; if you have a power failure while the computer is sleeping, you should see it waking from. The hibernate when you turn back on, instead of booting from scratch. I know that this was the case at some point when I checked during the Windows 8 years, I don't know if this is still true.

Interesting, I'll investigate