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Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

Corporate windows installations are unnecessarily slow because they run antivirus and all kinds of domain membership stuff in the boot and logon path. A clean install with fast boot and without that gunk takes seconds.

A headless linux can come up in seconds (UEFI fast boot + EFI stub) or even less than a second if you're in a VM and don't have to deal with the firmware startup. Booting to a lightweight window manager would only add a few seconds on top.

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Headless, schmeadless: a RPi with the Slowest Disk In The Universe come up to a functional GUI under a minute. Slower boot (and correlated, slow work) on far beefier hardware is down to pure crud. Sure, you need a bazillion updaters, two for each program, and three antiviruses checking each other - in other words, "users have fast computers, SHIP IT!"

If your host machine is a real server (eg poweredge), itll do a selftest. This already takes tens of seconds. If you want fast bootup times, you need to be the BIOS. The example in the top post is stuff that either loads data off a flash chip (like a bios works) or a disk (requires some bootstrapping).

Newer Dells like the R640 take minutes to boot, not seconds.

Here's a random video of a guy booting a R740, it takes 1:51 just to get into the bios: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSJNTdKdTJI

What does self-testing cover? RAM? That's something the OS could do as a background task, incrementally making memory available during boot after a chunk has been scanned.

Memory, peripherals, temperatures, fans, disks, network boot. RAM needs to be learned in, hence ddr first boots take a bit. https://github.com/librecore-org/librecore/wiki/Understandin...

DRAM testing is not really something you can do incrementally. Localized, bit-level failures are only one kind of failure; things get really interesting when you have disturbances (e.g., a shorted address line or something causes writes to some location to also change bits in another location).

Also, ECC failures usually cause a machine check. Not sure if you can control this on modern machines, it might be all or nothing.

Some of the companies' servers (e.g. Dell) can boot pretty fast in these days. If you want see something that boots slowly, try an IBM HS22 blade (3+ minutes self-initialization after insert, 2.5+ minutes to pass initial BIOS screen to storage initialization and boot-start).

IBM's QPI-linked dual servers boots even slower as one technician explained to me. Presumably you can make coffee during the wait.

I'm actually relatively confident that you could get it down to 8-9 seconds to the basic X environment with an NVMe SSD and maybe even less if you were to cache some application states.

Things are possible if one puts one's mind to it.

five seconds, year 2008: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

two seconds, year 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUUtZjd6UA4&t=17

And that 5 second boot time was on an Asus EEE 701, which had Intel Celeron M 630 MHz, and just 512 MB ram.

A few years ago I went about trying to get my laptop to boot as fast as possible. Got it down to 9 seconds from POST completion to X with Chromium running.

The only differences between the system I used for benchmarking and my regular desktop was autologin, chromium in the startup script, and the enablement of the benchmarking thing. I'll probably poke around with it tonight and see if it's any different on my new laptop. This one had a proper NVMe as opposed to the m.2 SSD in my old laptop.

My Windows desktop at work takes forever to get running. Even after you log in and the desktop is visible it's another minute until it's usable.

KolibriOS has a ~5 second boot time https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=84&v=XnlA4ijrTBo

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