4 ms·

7.7s is not "crawling" to boot. I don't think I've owned a computer that boots faster than that, and I've owned a few fancy, expensive computers over the years.

7.7s is not "crawling" to boot. I don't think I've owned a computer that boots faster than that, and I've owned a few fancy, expensive computers over the years. I remember spending a long time optimizing the boot sequence for one of my desktops years ago and I might have gotten close to that... but 7.7s is perfectly fine for something that is neither a microcontroller nor a cloud VM that has no real hardware to initialize. I just measured, and my M1 MacBook Air takes 32 seconds to boot to the unlock screen, and then a further 8 seconds after the password is entered before it reaches the desktop. As I'm sure you're aware, the M1 processor is no slouch, and Apple includes an NVMe SSD with respectable (though not mind blowing) performance in this laptop.

bjt2n3904 6y ago
Compared to your desktop / laptop? Sure. But this is the embedded world. I've got a minimalist image on a Beaglebone that takes just over 6 seconds to get to a shell from power on. But most of that is loading the kernel and U-Boot from the eMMC. From kernel to shell is 2.2 seconds. And the BeagleBone is long in the tooth, compared to the Pi4. NVMe absolutely screams for data transfer rates. And according to these tests, using NVMe adds 30 ms to the boot process. Something is wrong.
- coder543 6y ago
  > Something is wrong. Really disagree. Loading a few megabytes of kernel would take way less than a second even on microSD. eMMC can be noticeably faster, yet you’re still saying it takes 6 seconds on your eMMC BeagleBoard. Hardware initialization takes time. Can it be faster? Probably, but you haven’t provided a compelling example by referencing the BeagleBoard being one second faster. 7.7 seconds isn’t mind blowing, but it’s not crawling. It’s more than adequate here. If they optimize it more in the future... cool. If you want open systems, the upcoming RISC-V SBC revolution seems likely to be much friendlier than Broadcom, but the Pi is already more open than most ARM platforms, in my opinion.

bjt2n3904 6y ago

Compared to your desktop / laptop? Sure. But this is the embedded world. I've got a minimalist image on a Beaglebone that takes just over 6 seconds to get to a shell from power on. But most of that is loading the kernel and U-Boot from the eMMC. From kernel to shell is 2.2 seconds. And the BeagleBone is long in the tooth, compared to the Pi4. NVMe absolutely screams for data transfer rates. And according to these tests, using NVMe adds 30 ms to the boot process. Something is wrong.

coder543 6y ago
> Something is wrong. Really disagree. Loading a few megabytes of kernel would take way less than a second even on microSD. eMMC can be noticeably faster, yet you’re still saying it takes 6 seconds on your eMMC BeagleBoard. Hardware initialization takes time. Can it be faster? Probably, but you haven’t provided a compelling example by referencing the BeagleBoard being one second faster. 7.7 seconds isn’t mind blowing, but it’s not crawling. It’s more than adequate here. If they optimize it more in the future... cool. If you want open systems, the upcoming RISC-V SBC revolution seems likely to be much friendlier than Broadcom, but the Pi is already more open than most ARM platforms, in my opinion.