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Mostly just questionable hardware design and spoiled programmers who want to do too much in early boot. There is no technical reason why you couldn't have a mod

Mostly just questionable hardware design and spoiled programmers who want to do too much in early boot. There is no technical reason why you couldn't have a modern desktop booting in a couple of milliseconds. It's a tradeoff between being fast and being compatible with the rest of the world. At the end of the day, boot times are determined not by technical reasons but by how much the users are willing to tolerate. If the market demanded low boot times, the engineers would deliver. But seriously, there is a router that I shall not name here that spends 10 seconds sleeping to avoid a race condition after initializing some irrelevant service. And of course the entire boot process depends on this service.

pjc50 3y ago
> there is a router that I shall not name here that spends 10 seconds sleeping to avoid a race condition after initializing some irrelevant service Reliability is an issue here. There's all sorts of bits and pieces where it's miserably difficult to get a signal or event that something has come up, or there is such a mechanism and it's unreliable. Especially when there's third-party closed drivers or firmware involved. So somebody ends up giving up and putting the delay in, testing it a few hundred times, and declaring it done. But yes, lots of systems could come up faster if enough people cared.
ilyt 3y ago
> Mostly just questionable hardware design and spoiled programmers who want to do too much in early boot. There is no technical reason why you couldn't have a modern desktop booting in a couple of milliseconds. It's a tradeoff between being fast and being compatible with the rest of the world. You wouldn't even be able to initialize CPU & DRAM in "couple of milliseconds" Loading BIOS from flash alone would eat that budget few times over
xp84 3y ago
> not by technical reasons but by how much the users are willing to tolerate. Realizing this one clause is what helped me understand so much, including economics and traffic (induced demand). I call it the "misery constant." Number of lanes doesn't matter: People will adjust their lifestyles until they arrive at the highest level of misery they can tolerate. Add a lane and wait for equilibrium to reestablish at exactly the same level of congestion as before. Add a 10,000% (more??) increase in CPU and disk speed from the 128K Macintosh to the MacBook Pro, and oh look, it takes basically the same amount of time to boot or to launch an application as it did then, as the developers adjusted their wastefulness until they achieved the maximum level of delay the customers were willing to bear.

pjc50 3y ago

> there is a router that I shall not name here that spends 10 seconds sleeping to avoid a race condition after initializing some irrelevant service Reliability is an issue here. There's all sorts of bits and pieces where it's miserably difficult to get a signal or event that something has come up, or there is such a mechanism and it's unreliable. Especially when there's third-party closed drivers or firmware involved. So somebody ends up giving up and putting the delay in, testing it a few hundred times, and declaring it done. But yes, lots of systems could come up faster if enough people cared.

ilyt 3y ago

> Mostly just questionable hardware design and spoiled programmers who want to do too much in early boot. There is no technical reason why you couldn't have a modern desktop booting in a couple of milliseconds. It's a tradeoff between being fast and being compatible with the rest of the world. You wouldn't even be able to initialize CPU & DRAM in "couple of milliseconds" Loading BIOS from flash alone would eat that budget few times over

xp84 3y ago

> not by technical reasons but by how much the users are willing to tolerate. Realizing this one clause is what helped me understand so much, including economics and traffic (induced demand). I call it the "misery constant." Number of lanes doesn't matter: People will adjust their lifestyles until they arrive at the highest level of misery they can tolerate. Add a lane and wait for equilibrium to reestablish at exactly the same level of congestion as before. Add a 10,000% (more??) increase in CPU and disk speed from the 128K Macintosh to the MacBook Pro, and oh look, it takes basically the same amount of time to boot or to launch an application as it did then, as the developers adjusted their wastefulness until they achieved the maximum level of delay the customers were willing to bear.