8 ms·
FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds
- tiborsaas 3y agoThat's 48x faster than I can type boot.
- xwdv 3y agoIf you fired a bullet at 450m/s at a FreeBSD machine sitting 50 feet away, it would have enough time to boot up and perform operations before being struck and destroyed by the bullet.
- abwizz 3y agonow that's a relief
- tutfbhuf 3y ago50 feet is about 15 meter 450 m/s is 1620 km/h
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- joahua 3y agoWith an optical muzzle flash companion to wake it / circumvent the speed of sound, it could even complain about being shot at! https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6685317 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6685317
- vancroft 3y agoOr fire back if mounted on an autonomous drone
- the8472 3y agoFor ICBM test warheads they have a system that replaces the nuclear pit with a sensor package that measures the incoming shockfront, does signal processing and gets out a radio signal before the entire thing is crushed.
- whalesalad 3y agoit’s giving UDP energy
- sdfghswe 3y agoDoes this have a name? A keyword I could search for? A wikipedia page?
- the8472 3y agoHigh Explosive Radio Telemetry
- barryp 3y agoTry "The Computer Designed To Die In Microseconds" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYdAT0v4DHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYdAT0v4DHs (Scott Manley) https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/padwp/pdfs/2nwj2-03.pdf https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/padwp/pdfs/2nwj2-03.pdf
- MichaelZuo 3y agoSo if folks truly cared, it's possible to design a computer system to boot up, in a barebones fashion, and then do meaningful work and then transmit it, in under a millisecond?
- sudobash1 3y agoCertainly, and I imagine that there are plenty that we interact with on a regular basis. For example, door security sensors (like for Ring) will be off nearly all the time. When someone opens the door, they will power up, send a notification, and go dormant again. I don't know if this will happen within a single millisecond, but it certainly could if there was a design need. For many simple embedded systems that plug into the wall, the "boot" process will happen in under a millisecond. But it will take considerably longer than that for the voltage levels to stabilize. The real thing which differentiates these from a PC or phone is that they are not running what we would typically call an OS. They may be running an RTOS (a very simplified OS), but for many of them, as soon as they have stable power, they are off to the races (Just like the home-computers of the 80s. Just plug in and go.)
- eimrine 3y agoHow does bubblesort happened in FreeBSD? Can my laptop boot in 25 milliseconds now?
- cinntaile 3y agoI'm fairly sure you can find your answer in this thread from a couple of weeks ago. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36002574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36002574
- magicalhippo 3y agoIt was discussed[1] in the previous thread on the topic. Essentially limited stack and input known to be bounded to reasonable size, along with low complexity of implementation. And no, AFAIK, as your PC has to wait for hardware to initialize and such. This is for booting VMs. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37205552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37205552
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- butterisgood 3y agoHaving a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here? Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest. Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?
- CodesInChaos 3y ago> So what’s the use case here? Spinning up additional "servers" in the cloud when you receive many incoming requests. If requests are held in a queue waiting for the new server to start, a fast boot process will reduce the latency for those requests. > Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this? Cloud providers run VMs of different customers on the same physical machine. Hypervisors like Firecracker minimize the attack surface (smaller risk of local privilege escalation) and VM overhead (run more instances on one machine).
- butterisgood 3y agoAh alright. I’ve seen this done with an Erlang VM on Xen where Erlang is the “OS”. To me that seems a little more natural. But Unix as an “API” can work too though the processes are not as lightweight as Erlang’s.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Semaphor 3y agoBesides what sibling said, they mention a more general use case towards the end: > We can see a lot of potential uses for microVMs, not just in cloud scenarios. The ability to run a single program built for one OS on top of a totally different OS, without the overhead of running a full emulated environment all the time, could be very handy in all kinds of situations.
- avgcorrection 3y agoAll I know about turtles is that they should be made out of turtles and all the way down.
- the-dude 3y agoFirst line of article: Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more This is obviously not true.
- zb10948 3y agoIt's a bit of clonky writing, but in proper English "its boot speed" relates to the algorithm and not the FreeBSD kernel
- CodesInChaos 3y ago> Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more… I don't think that's correct. While the optimized sorting algorithm is 100x times faster than the old sorting algorithm, it was only a small part of the boot process (2ms), so the boot speed up is only 7%.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eatonphil 3y ago> I believe Linux is at 75-80 ms for the same environment where I have FreeBSD booting in 25 ms. From the article, Colin Percival on how Linux does as well. Impressive (though would be good to see other benchmarks to corroborate Colin's). (Which is an HN comment actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37205578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37205578.)
- emaste 3y agoI'm sure Colin's results can be reproduced, but it will take some effort. Colin has been doing a lot of work so that Firecracker can boot FreeBSD -- see https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2022-10-18-FreeBSD-Firecracker.html https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2022-10-18-FreeBSD-Firecrac... for an introduction -- and that is not yet all available in Firecracker "out of the box."
- baz00 3y agoThat's good. FreeBSD was pretty damn fast already, even on old hardware. But in the cloud it still takes several more seconds more seconds to download the container full of 200 megs of javascript shite from the local docker repo and fire it up before being able to service requests...
- wink 3y agoSeems to be a summary/rehash of https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/freebsd-firecracker https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/freebsd-fire... - which I guess came first, and is a better article.
- lproven 3y agoI wrote the article. Yes, it's a summary of that, overall, and I linked to that post in my article. That blog post is by the developer who did the work. Of course it came first: it is the source material! Did you not even notice that I linked to it and recommended reading it?!
- wink 3y agoYes, and sorry if that sounded too confrontational. I didn't take a lot of new things from this and I know many people here read the comments first, and in this case I prefer the source material.
- lproven 3y agoFair enough. It is a hard line to walk as a journo. I have discovered, the hard way, that: * _many_ people can't skim * but they don't know that they can't * so they misunderstand and blame the writer * no matter if you provide links to explain everything, many won't follow any of 'em * but you _must_ provide citations for every fact or claim What I try to do is boil down long stuff to shorter punchier summaries, and explain harder tech stuff so non-experts can follow it. If the reasons for something, or what it means, or why it matters, are not very obvious, I try to explain the whys and wherefores. But when it's simple, some will complain there's not enough. If it's not simple, some will complain it's too hard. No matter how well referenced, some will argue. Even if it's my direct personal experience, some will tell me I am wrong.
- aynyc 3y agoSee, all those leetcodes practice finally pay off /s. All seriousness, this is for VM booting right? Not hardware booting.
- lproven 3y agoI wrote the article. (I did not write the headline.) Primary sources are some HN threads, which I linked to, so I am surprised to see it here. That's why I didn't post it. It's for one very specific VM with one very specific role, which I carefully explained in the article.
- lousken 3y agoIf only windows optimized boot as well, it often takes ~10seconds even on the highest end machines
- kats 3y agoThe headline has got a lot of asterisks. On a server that's already running, they can open a new software-only VM in 25ms. So it's more like saying they launch a new application in 25ms. It still sounds great though.