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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

I'd say that's essentially what suspend-to-ram means. Booting means throwing that state away and rebuilding it.

Right, or even just something like suspend-to-disk (or other storage) but for the pre-OS part of the boot (so that constant power isn't required).

Why can this not work?

Isn’t that what “hibernate” is?

I would say no because I can’t reuse that state: all implementations that I’ve used discard the hibernated state afterwards. If there was an OS that reused those saved snapshots then I would argue that it does count as “booting”.

It would be even more interesting to do this on a per-application basis. Atom does something like this to cope with long startup times, for example.

Would the pre OS part of the boot process need less than all the available RAM?

Hibernate (suspend to disk) used to be slow with spinning disks. Even with SSDs, if on a 6 Gb/s SATA bus hibernating my 32 GB laptop would take 32 GB * 8 / 6 = 42 seconds, probably more. And 42 s to resume. My laptop goes from power off to login and Gnome loaded in less than that time. Of course it takes much more to open all the programs I need. That's why I suspend to RAM. Push a button to suspend and less than 10 s to be working again. By the way, it takes extra seconds for the laptop to connect to the Wi-Fi access point or to the ethernet switch. IMHO it's not fully usable until then.

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