I worked with someone who had previously been a senior engineer at one or maybe more than one hard drive manufacturers. He told me about a project he had worke

I worked with someone who had previously been a senior engineer at one or maybe more than one hard drive manufacturers. He told me about a project he had worked on where they collaborated with Microsoft to make something that would make the OS boot significantly faster working with their hard drive. I'm filling in blanks in my memory here, but I think it involved a combination of putting some files in flash memory (hybrid disk) as well as storing files on the spinning disk in the order they'd be accessed. It worked! They were able to make boot process significantly faster. But consumers would never see it. The punchline was, it turns out many peripheral devices and drivers rely on the boot process being slow that all kinds of race conditions and intermittent bugs and glitches turned up as soon as they started testing on a wider range of PCs. Even if you solved the dependency and order of scheduling problems on the main thread of the OS loading, devices may have microcontrollers that are slow to come online or drivers initializing independently. (You might object well doesn't the hardware or driver have a "ready for first query" flag or something like that. Well that depends on hardware manufacturers doing the right thing, thinking of that ahead of time to add it to the interface, and implementing it correctly. This would be something that had never been tested because previously there was always XX seconds before the OS tried to query the device for the first time.) So the moral of the story is the boot process of x86 PCs is still slow because it has always been slow...