Boot-up times are rapidly approaching the stage where the OS isn't the bottleneck - it's the BIOS. I often wonder what the hell it's doing for those 10-30 secon

Boot-up times are rapidly approaching the stage where the OS isn't the bottleneck - it's the BIOS. I often wonder what the hell it's doing for those 10-30 seconds. (depending on the motherboard) EFI in Macs is definitely snappier, at least until you start booting into Linux or Windows and the BIOS emulation kicks in and waits around for a couple seconds. Interestingly, you used to be able to get a decent speedup with hibernating (suspend to disk) but nowadays, with the bootup improvements and larger amounts of RAM (my workstation has 8GB; 4GB is pretty normal these days) it only helps if you've got lots of stuff open in your session. OSX's resume is a lot faster than Linux' though, so there's plenty scope for improvement. I suspect the problem is once again initialising the hardware - controlling the platform sure helps.