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[TheBoy]

Partly inspired by recent discussions of boot speeds.


In the mid 1990s, a typical Compaq ProLiant 2000 with a pair of Pentium 60Mhz, 64Mb of RAM, SMART(-1) Array card used to take around 12s to (warm) boot to the point the OS started to load.

Roll on well over 15yrs...

A typical HP Proliant BL465 G7 blade, with a pair of 16 core AMD processors, 128Gb RAM, SMART Array P410i takes 185s to (warm) boot to the point the OS starts to load.


WTF??

[feeutfo]

I suppose they are actually worth turning in these days, much more capable...?

[cem_devecioglu]

 
 
even if , say kernel is 10x times bigger, new disk systems are much faster.. I think the problem lies in device driver software..  there are numerous drivers for new systems which probably checks every detail of hardware
 
or they way services and drivers start are changed and checked by the system so that boot requires more time..

[cem_devecioglu]

hmm now seen the last sentence
 
 

[Kevin Wood]

Software developers getting lazy.

They should all be dumped on a real-time project at least once in their career where response times are in the microseconds (and actually in the requirement spec!).

.. and device drivers are in the most sensitive part of the system and often the worst quality code when hardware manufacturers lash something together as an afterthought so the hardware can hit the market.

[cem_devecioglu]

Software developers getting lazy.

They should all be dumped on a real-time project at least once in their career where response times are in the microseconds (and actually in the requirement spec!).

.. and device drivers are in the most sensitive part of the system and often the worst quality code when hardware manufacturers lash something together as an afterthought so the hardware can hit the market.

yep.. more than that brain applying handbrake at late hours

[Rods2]

Most software drivers from hardware companies seem to have been written as an after thought by the cleaner between hovering and mopping the office floor. 

Most modern software developers are not even aware of the concepts of compact code writing and performance tuning. "Well it works don't it". 

[Sir Tigger KC]

My laptop seems to sense when I need to check something quickly, because then it always takes aaages!!! 

One day we'll laugh and say things like 'Do you remember the days when we had to wait for the computer to warm up.... ' 

[Andy B]

....
 'Do you remember the days when we had to wait for the computer to warm up.... ' 

like when we had to wait for the valve 'wireless' to warm up! 

[Sir Tigger KC]

....
 'Do you remember the days when we had to wait for the computer to warm up.... ' 

like when we had to wait for the valve 'wireless' to warm up! 

Exactly! 

[Marks DTM Calib]

Poor programming, badly architectured software and drivers.

The only drivers I ever find are ok are graphics ones mainly due to the pissing contest they are in with respect to frame rates etc so have to be good.

When I think of the protection switching times of 50ms we had to meet for a fully loaded photonics connection, the RTS had to be shit hot and often needed work at the machine code level!

[TheBoy]

Remember this is just to the point of the OS bootloader starting, NOT booting the OS as well. I purposely left the OS out, due to the variances.

So, in effect, this is just the POST time.

[Kevin Wood]

Yes, but whereas the BIOS ROM used to be some tight code that made sure you had some memory that worked, then did very basic initialisation on the interrupt and VM controllers, display, keyboard and storage devices, loaded sector zero from the relevant disk and ran it, you can bet it's now bloated out with numerous drivers from hardware vendors and other unnecessary rubbish.

Very, very rarely have I ever seen time constraints in a spec for a piece of software, so the developer does it the easiest way to code, not necessarily the most sensible.

In the rush to overcomplicate everything we have also lost oversight. A developer working on a small software module that's destined for a BIOS might not consider the end-user impact of wasting a millisecond during boot up. He probably doesn't know how many thousand times his code is being called while the user twiddles his thumbs.

In the good old days, said software module WAS the BIOS.