5 ms·

> Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passph

> Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase. What sort of machines boot in one second? My 12-core Linux desktop with one of the fastest nvme drives on the market sure doesn’t. I’d guess more like 15-20s. I don’t think my wife’s M1 Mac is at all close to 1s either, unless you count waking from sleep. I haven’t paid much attention to it, but I feel like people simply restart their computers less often than they did 15 years ago, so boot time isn’t the most compelling metric when selling machines these days.

Aeolun 4y ago
I don’t really have to reboot my M1 ever (short of updates), so booting is more or less equal to flipping open the screen.
- kqr 4y ago
  But then it's not booting. Waking up from sleep/hibernation has always been fast.
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    Would you call "booting" what Windows does with Fast Startup enabled, then? It is half resume from a hibernation image (kernel and system services), half going through the regular booting process (rest of userland).
    - jabbany 4y ago
      Probably not. Certainly not a true cold boot. Anytime Windows does big "reboot-required" updates, the fast boot thing doesn't apply anymore and it can take considerably longer due to the forced cold boot.
  - pletnes 4y ago
    Windows has me waiting for un-sleep and wifi reconnect, even if just a few seconds. On my M1 I see it’s open and connected while I open the lid, it’s quite a bit faster. Doesn’t matter all that much but I never dare to sleep my win laptops in my bag - sometimes they wake up and overheat while in the bag. Having stable sleep is more important to me
  - esrauch 4y ago
    Sleep/hibernation was always horribly bugged is my memory. Fast, maybe, but still horrible.
jabbany 4y ago
This +1. I have a similar setup and it definitely takes upwards of 20s for a cold boot. Though like mentioned above, I don't really do cold boots that often and my average uptime is about a 20 days (mostly rebooting to apply updates). My guess is that doing proper power on self test (POST) stuff will always add a delay (having multiple network ports and 128G of RAM does not help). Though a lot of modern OSes like Windows just cheat by hibernating instead of properly shutting down, so they can save on the time to load up stuff like drivers.
- xtracto 4y ago
  Hibernating is one of the things I wish worked better on Linux. I am one of those few that dont like leaving my PC in sleep mode , but prefer a complete off state with full hibernation. The times when I've tried to setup hibernation in Linux, it is clumsy (add swap file, config textfile mangling, etc) and theres always something that doesn't work when coming from hibernation. I would even pay for some super fast/small non-volatile storage dedicated for Hibernation file. Maybe some internal small (64gb) hyperfast name raid0 setup. This being 2022...
marttt 4y ago
FreeDOS would boot in about 2 seconds, literally. :)
duped 4y ago
Fast boot is usually a setting that you can enable in your BIOS.
woodrowbarlow 4y ago
if you boot linux directly from efi (no bootloader), remove plymouth, and tweak your cmdline and mkinitcpio a bit, you'll shave a massive bulk off a mainline distro's boot time. boot to a lighter-weight login manager (or just getty) to save the rest. i bet you could get sub-second cold-boot time on that desktop, not counting the firmware stage.
mrguyorama 4y ago
My Windows PC, with a cheap low range samsung SSD boots from dead to Firefox playing a youtube video again in less than ten seconds. It's the main reason I haven't put much effort into fixing a dumb BSOD that is probably caused by the same SSD.

Aeolun 4y ago

I don’t really have to reboot my M1 ever (short of updates), so booting is more or less equal to flipping open the screen.

kqr 4y ago
But then it's not booting. Waking up from sleep/hibernation has always been fast.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Would you call "booting" what Windows does with Fast Startup enabled, then? It is half resume from a hibernation image (kernel and system services), half going through the regular booting process (rest of userland).
  - jabbany 4y ago
    Probably not. Certainly not a true cold boot. Anytime Windows does big "reboot-required" updates, the fast boot thing doesn't apply anymore and it can take considerably longer due to the forced cold boot.
- pletnes 4y ago
  Windows has me waiting for un-sleep and wifi reconnect, even if just a few seconds. On my M1 I see it’s open and connected while I open the lid, it’s quite a bit faster. Doesn’t matter all that much but I never dare to sleep my win laptops in my bag - sometimes they wake up and overheat while in the bag. Having stable sleep is more important to me
- esrauch 4y ago
  Sleep/hibernation was always horribly bugged is my memory. Fast, maybe, but still horrible.

jabbany 4y ago

This +1. I have a similar setup and it definitely takes upwards of 20s for a cold boot. Though like mentioned above, I don't really do cold boots that often and my average uptime is about a 20 days (mostly rebooting to apply updates). My guess is that doing proper power on self test (POST) stuff will always add a delay (having multiple network ports and 128G of RAM does not help). Though a lot of modern OSes like Windows just cheat by hibernating instead of properly shutting down, so they can save on the time to load up stuff like drivers.

xtracto 4y ago
Hibernating is one of the things I wish worked better on Linux. I am one of those few that dont like leaving my PC in sleep mode , but prefer a complete off state with full hibernation. The times when I've tried to setup hibernation in Linux, it is clumsy (add swap file, config textfile mangling, etc) and theres always something that doesn't work when coming from hibernation. I would even pay for some super fast/small non-volatile storage dedicated for Hibernation file. Maybe some internal small (64gb) hyperfast name raid0 setup. This being 2022...

marttt 4y ago

FreeDOS would boot in about 2 seconds, literally. :)

duped 4y ago

Fast boot is usually a setting that you can enable in your BIOS.

woodrowbarlow 4y ago

if you boot linux directly from efi (no bootloader), remove plymouth, and tweak your cmdline and mkinitcpio a bit, you'll shave a massive bulk off a mainline distro's boot time. boot to a lighter-weight login manager (or just getty) to save the rest. i bet you could get sub-second cold-boot time on that desktop, not counting the firmware stage.

mrguyorama 4y ago

My Windows PC, with a cheap low range samsung SSD boots from dead to Firefox playing a youtube video again in less than ten seconds. It's the main reason I haven't put much effort into fixing a dumb BSOD that is probably caused by the same SSD.