4 ms·

The fact that reboots happen mostly when software (kernels, system) is upgraded is part of it. It's simplest and most reliable to initialize the system from cle

The fact that reboots happen mostly when software (kernels, system) is upgraded is part of it. It's simplest and most reliable to initialize the system from clean state (I've often had an idea it would be best to reinstall Windows+software for each reboot).

adsche 7y ago
Yes, but do you have an idea why that is, why is it so much more reliable to initalize every time than to generate an initialized configuration and reuse that? Developer errors? Not enough testing?
- dannypgh 7y ago
  Part of it is hardware support- your machine's state isn't just in main ram and CPU registers, it's also in the state of every embedded microcontroller and onboard memory of every device on the machine. It's to limit the complexity of suspend/resume that a lot of OSes will do things like reinitialize all drivers (e.g. unload/load kernel modules) to try to get the whole system into a known state, but this takes time. Relatedly, hardware can be added (or enabled) between boots, so whatever conditional hardware initialization was done when booting may result in a state that's not quite accurate later. Furthermore, some of the state (e.g. anything involving system time) will always need to be modified after restore, and that's a state transiston that's less well tested (moving your clock forward hours or days may make a lot of software flake out).
cesarb 7y ago
> reboots happen mostly when software (kernels, system) is upgraded is part of it Only if you never turn your machine off. Don't you power off your desktop every day when leaving work?
- scarface74 7y ago
  At most, I would expect most technical people put their desktops to sleep when they leave. Well really, I would expect most of us to have laptops where we just close the top and it just sleeps.
nickpsecurity 7y ago
There was a hard drive on the market in the past for high-security use that had write-protect and an admin mode. Maybe a PIN or something to get to admin mode. Memory getting fuzzy on it. The normal usage would be read-only with you saving your data elsewhere or to a write-able partition that had nothing to do with read-only part for OS and apps. Go into admin mode to change those. Otherwise, your system is fresh every boot. People do it with VM's, too. I think you were aiming for something physical with no extra software. That was closest thing I could think to it.

adsche 7y ago

Yes, but do you have an idea why that is, why is it so much more reliable to initalize every time than to generate an initialized configuration and reuse that? Developer errors? Not enough testing?

dannypgh 7y ago
Part of it is hardware support- your machine's state isn't just in main ram and CPU registers, it's also in the state of every embedded microcontroller and onboard memory of every device on the machine. It's to limit the complexity of suspend/resume that a lot of OSes will do things like reinitialize all drivers (e.g. unload/load kernel modules) to try to get the whole system into a known state, but this takes time. Relatedly, hardware can be added (or enabled) between boots, so whatever conditional hardware initialization was done when booting may result in a state that's not quite accurate later. Furthermore, some of the state (e.g. anything involving system time) will always need to be modified after restore, and that's a state transiston that's less well tested (moving your clock forward hours or days may make a lot of software flake out).

cesarb 7y ago

> reboots happen mostly when software (kernels, system) is upgraded is part of it Only if you never turn your machine off. Don't you power off your desktop every day when leaving work?

scarface74 7y ago
At most, I would expect most technical people put their desktops to sleep when they leave. Well really, I would expect most of us to have laptops where we just close the top and it just sleeps.

nickpsecurity 7y ago

There was a hard drive on the market in the past for high-security use that had write-protect and an admin mode. Maybe a PIN or something to get to admin mode. Memory getting fuzzy on it. The normal usage would be read-only with you saving your data elsewhere or to a write-able partition that had nothing to do with read-only part for OS and apps. Go into admin mode to change those. Otherwise, your system is fresh every boot. People do it with VM's, too. I think you were aiming for something physical with no extra software. That was closest thing I could think to it.