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Boot is a misleading term, but you can resume snapshotted VMs in single digit ms

(and without unikernels, though they certainly help)

You can boot a vm without snapshots in < 10ms, just need a minimal kernel.

I think "in a VM" was elided. It's easy to tune qemu + Linux to boot up a VM in 150ms (or much less in fact).

Real hardware is unfortunately limited by the time it takes to initialize firmware, some of which could be solvable with open source firmware and some (eg. RAM training) is not easily fixable.

Stripping away unused drivers (.config) and other "bloats" can get you surprisingly far.

But 150ms? That's boot time for dos or minix maybe (tiny kernels). 1s sure.

You can do <10ms. I was working to see if I could get it under 1ms, but my best was 3.5ms

FreeBSD did some work to boot in 25ms.

Source: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/29/freebsd_boots_in_25ms...

for example: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/

And most importantly and TFA mentions it several times: stripping unused drivers (and even the ability to load drivers/modules) and bloat brings very real security benefits.

I know you were responding about the boot times but that's just the icing on the cake.

Mostly depends on how bloat correlates to attack surface, but you're right

Microvm's