5 ms·

I worked with a brilliant engineer who had previously worked at one of the major hard drive manufacturers. He told me about a project he'd worked where the dis

I worked with a brilliant engineer who had previously worked at one of the major hard drive manufacturers. He told me about a project he'd worked where the disk manufacturer had their firmware writers collaborate with low-level OS programmers to significantly speed up modern PC boot times. The conclusion was yes they could technically do it, but they found so many peripherals and device drivers that relied on the boot being slow (either intentionally or unintentionally - e.g. hardware or software race conditions, device drivers not actually making sure the device is ready yet, etc.) that there was "no point."

kabdib 4y ago
I've seen code that (a) issued an async read (b) did some computation (c) used the buffer filled in by that async read ... without actually seeing if the read completed. Hilarity ensued when the CPU got faster. This was in stuff that shipped to hundreds of thousands of customers. If you're having a good day, you can definitely address that problem by reading device drivers for a few hours.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  It seems like this would be classic Apple territory, to one up their competitors via their unique vertically integrated position.
  - wil421 4y ago
    Yes it is. I’ve heard from Hackintosh Overclocker types that Apples ACPI[1] tables are the best and most of the PC motherboard manufacturers are compete garbage. Including WTF how does this hardware even function moments. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI
    - xmodem 4y ago
      I assume things are better these days, but back in 2005 the thing that lead me to switch to mac was seeing a friend with a powerbook which had a sleep mode that actually worked.
      - nikanj 4y ago
        I grabbed my (sleeping, lid closed) macbook from my desk this morning. When I pulled the charger to put it into my bag, I started hearing the faint audio of the youtube video I was playing when I closed the lid last night. Macs today sleep like Windows machines a decade ago
user_7832 4y ago
On a tangential note, that reminds me of my mom's former (Asus) laptop - it advertised booting up in 2 seconds, and actually was pretty close! I didn't think much beyond "must be a fast SSD with skipping the bios screen"... until while debugging some storage issues I realized it was an HDD XD I guess when manufacturers want to do something well they really can integrate everything.

kabdib 4y ago

I've seen code that (a) issued an async read (b) did some computation (c) used the buffer filled in by that async read ... without actually seeing if the read completed. Hilarity ensued when the CPU got faster. This was in stuff that shipped to hundreds of thousands of customers. If you're having a good day, you can definitely address that problem by reading device drivers for a few hours.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
It seems like this would be classic Apple territory, to one up their competitors via their unique vertically integrated position.
- wil421 4y ago
  Yes it is. I’ve heard from Hackintosh Overclocker types that Apples ACPI[1] tables are the best and most of the PC motherboard manufacturers are compete garbage. Including WTF how does this hardware even function moments. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI
  - xmodem 4y ago
    I assume things are better these days, but back in 2005 the thing that lead me to switch to mac was seeing a friend with a powerbook which had a sleep mode that actually worked.
    - nikanj 4y ago
      I grabbed my (sleeping, lid closed) macbook from my desk this morning. When I pulled the charger to put it into my bag, I started hearing the faint audio of the youtube video I was playing when I closed the lid last night. Macs today sleep like Windows machines a decade ago

user_7832 4y ago

On a tangential note, that reminds me of my mom's former (Asus) laptop - it advertised booting up in 2 seconds, and actually was pretty close! I didn't think much beyond "must be a fast SSD with skipping the bios screen"... until while debugging some storage issues I realized it was an HDD XD I guess when manufacturers want to do something well they really can integrate everything.