6 ms·
It's a pretty good point, ordinary computers could boot up from cold in under 30 seconds on 5400 rpm spinning rust, so why can't they boot up in under 1 second
by MichaelZuo 3y ago
It's a pretty good point, ordinary computers could boot up from cold in under 30 seconds on 5400 rpm spinning rust, so why can't they boot up in under 1 second on the latest and greatest NVMe SSDs?
- amarshall 3y agoNot every part of the boot process is bottlenecked by disk I/O.
- jdiff 3y agoEvery part it's bottlenecked is similarly exponentially improved from the olden days though.
- tempestn 3y agoOne of the slowest parts of boot-up is memory checking, where the speed has increased exponentially, but so has the size.
- jdiff 3y agoMaybe it's the single slowest individual item, but it's very far from being a significant fraction of boot time. And the capacity really hasn't kept up the way speed has. My desktop has 24GB of DDR3 1600 and manages to post in under 2 seconds. And that's pretty old by today's standards. Mid level modern hardware runs at least a circle or two around this system in terms of speed, but in terms of capacity it's still right in line with a higher end system today. Maybe I'm atypical but my boot time is dominated by my OS spinning itself up, by a long shot.
- tempestn 3y agoI suppose it depends. My AMD DDR5 machine spends most of its boot time on memory training. Once that's done it's only a few seconds into the OS. (I know I could enable fast boot to skip that most of the time, but I rarely reboot and would rather have the guaranteed stability.)
- beebmam 3y agoMy PC takes about 5 seconds to boot to be usable.
- jeffbee 3y agoMy NUC boots Ubuntu in 3 seconds flat, including POST.
- walteweiss 3y agoHow is this possible? Is it super new?
- jeffbee 3y agoThere were two things I had to do to shave the last few seconds, the most beneficial was disabling all the unnecessary peripherals in the BIOS. When I looked at the Ubuntu boot log it said it spend 1.7 seconds uploading firmware to the bluetooth controller, which at that point was like 95% of the post-POST boot time, and not needing that I just turned it off in the BIOS.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoNot my recollection, TBH. Yes, my VIC-20 or C64 turned on to immediate usability, but it had no spinning media or real operating system. My Atari ST took quite a few seconds to spin the floppy and dump to desktop. My next computer in the early 90s, a 486 50 running Linux I think would seem interminably slow to me now; Linux boot was faster than DOS/Win3.1 but still we're talking a big chunk of time. Honestly, things are much faster now than they used to be. Plus I can shut my laptop lid, use basically no power, and come back to my session as-is almost instantly. That's new and way better than the 80s and 90s. Then you either had to leave the machine on or suffer slow cold boots.
- Symbiote 3y agoRISC OS, the operating system that ran on the first few generations of ARM CPUs in the 1980s and early 1990s, was stored on ROM chips. It booted in a few seconds, to a real OS with a GUI etc. https://youtu.be/5M6OIOIND-0?t=1278 https://youtu.be/5M6OIOIND-0?t=1278 — I think about 12 seconds, or which 3-4 is waiting for two hard drives to spin up.
- bluGill 3y agoWhich is great and fast - until you want/need to upgrade the OS. Security hole, too bad, that is baked into ROM and can't be fixed...
- Symbiote 3y agoRISC OS could selectively replace parts of the ROM (in RAM) with new code/data, for upgrades, new device drivers and so on. (I think some viruses loaded themselves with this mechanism. And virus checkers.) https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/File%20formats:%20Relocatable%20Module https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/File%20fo...
- bluGill 3y agoSure, but everytime you need to do that boot time goes down and so what was the point?
- Syonyk 3y agoComplexity. Size. Windows 95 was about 50MB installed with most features. Windows 2000 fit on a CD for the install. Current Windows 10 installers won't even fit on a single layer DVD anymore, and forget doing the install with a FAT32 USB stick (some older UEFIs won't handle exFAT yet). The fastest computer I've ever used, perceptually, was a dual Pentium 3 866, with Rambus, booting XP (probably SP1 or so) on 15k U320 SCSI disk. The thing was telepathic.
- morelisp 3y agoThe P3 era was really a golden age. Clock speeds were still rapidly doubling, you could get SMP but most people didn't so everything had to optimize single-threaded perf, and likewise "normal" memory spanned 32MB to 512MB so you could really keep multiple programs' full working sets ready at once.
- water9 3y agoI would've said P4 era with hyperthreading opening the door to multi-core programming paradigms. Clock speeds mostly capped around 5ghz since that era
- jorvi 3y agoI’d rather call that the Athlon era. P4’s ran like (literal) hot garbage, Athlon’s absolutely crushed them.
- Affric 3y agoAthlon was amazing.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoIf we're going back to that time period... Alpha. How I coveted my roommate's machine that had one in it.
- mewse-hn 3y agoRecently, I was able to get a NVME SSD into an old dell (i5-4590) using a modified bios and a PCIE adapter card. It booted into fresh win 10 in seconds. I think it's the old problem where the more crap windows accumulates, the longer it takes to boot.
- rocky1138 3y agoRelevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37212557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37212557
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThat is speedy, 2.2 seconds on a 9.54 MHz Tandy 1000RL! The ~4 seconds to boot up to a GUI desktop is actually even more impressive: https://youtu.be/JIEPqD4luG8?si=9gVtFCIxFYma1erC&t=556 https://youtu.be/JIEPqD4luG8?si=9gVtFCIxFYma1erC&t=556 My top of the line i9-9880H Macbook Pro from 2019, with PCIe 4.0 NVMe speeds, needs over 20 seconds to boot up in comparison...
- toast0 3y agoI had a Tandy 1000 TL/2; it had a tandy specific MS-DOS 3.3 with Deskmate setup in ROM, booted pretty darn fast; but you had to give that up if you wanted to boot a newer dos. A newer MS-DOS still booted quick, and there wasn't much to the BIOS before it hit the drives, but you couldn't run Deskmate on standard MS-DOS.
- rocky1138 3y agoI realize at the time it wasn't very easy for most people but a computer that often receives upgrades via ROM is the Atari ST. I (sort of) recently upgraded my 1040. I bet one could produce DOS 6.22 replacement ROMs for the Tandy!
- cocodill 3y agomy fresh PC with 64GB DDR5 takes a minute til POST.
- water9 3y agoCheck bios for fast boot setting perhaps?
- dist-epoch 3y agoDDR5 memory has this thing where it needs to be "trained" to figure out the best settings for a particular memory/motherboard combination. Maybe your PC "trains" the memory every boot instead of just the first one. https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-memory/ddr5-memory-training https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-memory/ddr5-mem...
- perihelions 3y agoI'm skeptical if that's design behavior, or if this article is in that category of "stories manufacturers write to trick people into not RMA'ing obviously defective product batches" ("A small number of DDR5 systems...") It's not only the multiple 15-minute RAM boot times (!?) that are worrying: it's that I'd have zero visibility into what underlying cause is responsible for these "small number" of events, and what other symptoms could develop later on (outside the RMA window). I couldn't just take the manufacturer's reassurance at face value.
- dist-epoch 3y ago> This essentially involves measuring lengths of wires from memory controller to individual DRAM chips. The idea there is that it is impossible to make them well-enough matched for the frequencies involved, so the deliberate difference is compensated for in logic and software (also it saves space on PCB of both motherboard and the DIMMs themselves). https://www.systemverilog.io/design/ddr4-initialization-and-calibration/#readwrite-training https://www.systemverilog.io/design/ddr4-initialization-and-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U3-hST9YBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U3-hST9YBg
- fatnoah 3y agoMy Windows 11 PC boots in about 20 seconds. Over half of that time is the POST. Once that's done, I see the Windows login in about 5-10 seconds. It's fast enough that I don't really notice.
- b20000 3y agobecause parts of code these days is written in languages like java, python, etc which means at least some software runs slower. add to that that people think that because machines are faster they don’t need to optimize anything.
- the8472 3y agoMostly a matter of software not being written to make use of the SSD capabilities. You need parallelism or prefetching to keep the IO queues non-empty. If you have a single-threaded workload which interleaves blocking IO with CPU work and the IO patterns are not amenable to readaheads the SSD will be mostly idle. Similarly anything calling fsync or performing other file system operations that trigger synchronous writes on the critical path will stall the entire boot process. Due to caching writes are fast no matter the medium as long as you don't demand instant durability.
- biogene 3y agoThey do, on the same workload. But if you look at the virtual memory breakdown, the vast majority of pages are non-executable data pages. Just did a rough check with Firefox and the executable pages are ~200MiB compared to ~2GiB of Private+Shared Pages. So its not so much the code, its all the data - the graphics, dictionaries, icons, fonts, textures, cached data, etc, etc.
- pixl97 3y agoMost likely because that ordinary computer of that time wasn't trying to bring up any network devices. Simply put, strip down an OS to the same feature set of that ancient computer and the modern OS will be a lot faster. Some of the networkless VMs I mess with boot in a second or two, but you see we've abstracted most of the hardware away. So, mostly the problem is a hardware one.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoWindows 8.1 boots up in under 30 seconds on a 2012 mid-range Thinkpad X220 with the stock HDD.
- crazygringo 3y agoIcons used to be 32x32 monochrome with a mask. Now they're 512x512 in 48-bit color. System fonts used to have ~200 characters, now they have tens of thousands. Extrapolate to everything else and it becomes pretty clear. There's just so much more to load.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThe math indicates otherwise, as another user pointed out, a 9.54 MHz Tandy 1000RL could load to MS-DOS in 2.2 seconds with 512 KB of very very slow RAM and a very slow 20MB drive. Even factoring in 100x more resource usage for a 2023 computer to deliver all the features expected, it definitely should be way under 2.2 seconds.
- crazygringo 3y agoYou've got to go way more than 100x. An 80x24 character screen used 2K of memory. Running two 4K monitors today uses 50MB of memory. That's 25,000x more usage of memory for the interface alone.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago100x total system resource demands. Display memory usage made nowhere near a straight multiplier of a difference even in 1989, as demonstrated by the 1000RLX vs 1000RL, which you would have known if you followed the link in the other comment and watched the video. You can verify this yourself by hooking up a VGA resolution display, the same as the 1989 Tandy 1000RLX shown, to a modern desktop computer with VGA out and it doesn't reduce boot times by any significant amount.
- crazygringo 3y agoIt was just one example. Total resource demands are still way, way, way over 100x. Data speeds. Peripheral inputs. Storage. Basically everything. And no, of course a computer doesn't boot at a different speed depending on display size. It's about the assets and code that fill displays of that size -- all the graphics you've got to load, all the code that has to draw the antialiasing and transparencies and shadows and subpixel font ligatures and everything else. Same way the code for dealing with storage capabilities is way more than 100x as complex. For peripherals. Etc etc etc.
- dep_b 3y agoGod I wish I could run MacOS 8.1, Windows 95 OSR 2.1 or Windows 2000 SP4 on modern hardware. Especially with some tweaking that removes artificial animation delays that stuff should be flying so ungodly fast.