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Comment by verisimilitudes | Hacker News Reader

Windows is a bloated mess, so it's obvious there.

As for anything POSIX, it's because UNIX is shitware; it took a long time to boot decades ago and it takes a long time to boot now, because more garbage has been piled on top.

It's possible for a good operating system to boot in less than a second, however. People have simply been conditioned to accept this unacceptable state of affairs, no different than a TV that takes ten seconds to become usable for no reason other than the manufacturer was lazy.

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There are embedded Linux demos that boot into a GUI application in about a second. Linux systems don't boot slowly because "POSIX" isn't capable, it is a matter of boot time vs. flexibility and developer convenience / development time. There are also Windows CE systems that boot that fast. Linux demo: https://www.toradex.com/de/videos/fast-boot-demo-with-linux-...

I have a few moderate boot time improvement projects on embedded Linux under my belt. The typical low hanging fruit are hardcoded wait times in boot loader and drivers, unnecessary drivers, unnecessary features (did you know that PPP - yes, the modem thing - support takes a while to initialize?), slow to mount filesystems, bad choice of storing / compressing the kernel, and delays in the init system (run the application as soon as possible instead). More hardcore techniques are various methods to reduce dynamic linker overhead and reordering blocks on storage in the order they will be read at startup.

Came here to say this. I've worked on embedded Linux projects with a boot time requirement of 2 seconds and easily made it.

I guess part of the difference is that you explicitly enumerate all hardware and drivers in a device tree on embedded rather than figuring it out on the fly like on a desktop/server machine.

I have a GUI linux, and it boots in 3s on stock xps 13.

Magic trick? Open RC + no crapware + lightweight DE

I use no preloading daemons, prelinkers, gold, or malloc hacks

It's not bad and people did some good work on the boot times: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

There's nothing inherent to posix that stops us from booting in seconds.

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..

The old world was mostly stateless. Power = function.

That said, even CRT had 'boot' time. The screen would need a few seconds to finally warm up and be fully on. But it was still a mind free system, you knew that your were done with the boot process and could enjoy 90% of functionality.

>The screen would need a few seconds to finally warm up and be fully on.

is that why we hear the audio before video is ready ?

Yes. The radio receiver, sound decoder, amplifier and speaker all work on very little charge and can bring you the sound in a fraction of a second after being turned on; the CRT needs to power up magnets and a particle accelerator

Late in the history of CRTs, some units kept the electron gun warmed up whenever the unit was plugged in -- so it was never all the way off. That enabled an "instant on" feature, at the cost of more power usage.

Pretty sure the "instant on" sets also caused premature aging to the CRT. They'd keep the filament partially heated all the time.

and premature aging of your savings

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.

Recently I got an email ad for a "smart" kettle with an app that you can remotely turn the kettle on, or schedule a time for it to turn on...

I'll beat that: I was watching a modern flat-screen fancy tv. It blacked out and rebooted while I was watching. Screw startup if they can't even stay up. OMG TVs can now crash...

Not to defend that, but it reminds me of a project for the raspberry pi that would let it output teletext signals over its composite port. The original version was a bit buggy and would crash the onboard computer in CRT TV's.

This happened to me when i was playing xbox recently. I'm not sure if it was the game (Division 2) or the TV but it really surprised me.

I used to achieve 1-2 second boot times by just reconfiguring my kernel to only load drivers for hardware I actually had installed. It's more like 4-5 seconds now that ASLR is a thing, but I'm not complaining.

I installed Manjaro about a week ago and it cold boots in ~5 seconds (not counting the grub menu to select between windows and manjaro)

While I don't agree with everything you wrote I would like to add android boot time to the list.

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