Intel is working on hardware to facilitate instant-on capability for PCs. It works on the same principle as the saved state functionality that OS vendors have used to eliminate the lengthy boot-up that PC users hate, but in hardware. What’s really interesting about their work is that this saved state will not only work when the user shuts down the system properly, but will work even after a power outage. This has interesting application in the server space too, and eliminating the boot-up would help reduce downtime after a UPS failure, for example.
“..eliminating the boot-up would help reduce downtime after a UPS failure, for example.”
Or after applying the latest Microsoft patch 😉
Unfortunately, if a reboot is necessary after a patch, the saved state functionality would probably not be applicable. It would need to go through a complete reboot.
my PC comes on just as fast as my Vacuum tube powered magnavox.
OOOOHHH
you mean to come on like one of them new fangeled color TVs eh…yeah, my brother has one of those….takes all of 30 seconds…wow!! what a difference!!
They really need to tackle the problem at its source, not put more bandaids on. But then, no one wants to start over again with the lessons learned up to today because there goes the backwards compatibility and upgrade sales gold mines…
Remember OS/2 had this great feature that would resume from memory point. It was great until my system crashed and OS/2 restarted to the point right before it crashed. Then it crashed, and resumed and crashed and resumed and crashed…..
Remember OS/2 had this great feature that would resume from memory point. It was great until my system crashed and OS/2 restarted to the point right before it crashed. Then it crashed, and resumed and crashed and resumed and crashed…..
That’s a good point.
The OS should came in a ROM “cartridge” (like the old Nintendo cartridges)and it should have an EPROM memory to install patches.
That will also eliminate:
a) the piracy problem (since one OS cartridge can only be inserted into a slot a single PC at a time)
b) the dangers of a virus corrupting critical files
c) many problems of instability
just 02 cents
hmmmm…..you might be on to something.
that would free up a lot of space on the hard drive AND speed up the OS A LOT.
ROM-based OSes are also quite a bit faster to start up, etc. They are also so much more durable and convenient, IMHO.
It’s sad that no one even bothers to make ROM/RAM based laptop/desktop solutions anymore, esp. considering the cheap cost of RAM.
The problem being that 500MB-1GB+ of EEPROM for the OS would add a hell of a lot to the cost of a system.
I had thoughts of making and selling a computer like this.
Rom based is the answer.
Wont happen as long as EVIL IDIOT computers RAPE us and force CriminalSofts OS.
Intel and Microsoft share business practices and strategies to Forced Obsolescence/OUTDATE/UPDATE computers every few years to take our dollars.
ROM-based OSes are also quite a bit faster to start up, etc. They are also so much more durable and convenient, IMHO.
It’s sad that no one even bothers to make ROM/RAM based laptop/desktop solutions anymore, esp. considering the cheap cost of RAM.
Aren´t the RISCOS guys trying to put up something like that lately? I mean, a complete desktop based on a ROM OS running on top of a ARM processor?
Seems like they were a little bit popular in Europe in it its hey days.
Remember “core” based memory modules in the early primitive computer systems. Core is a type of memory that saves its state across power cycles, therefore letting you power cycle a machine without losing the memory. This is the same concept. – just 50 years later 🙂
Oh – I forgot to mention. This is where the term “core dump” comes from on Unix systems. It’s the actual data dumped from the “core” to the disk when process fails and is useful for debugging. Just FYI.
Intel, Microsoft and OEMs have been talking about building instant-on PCs since at least 1993, when I started following the industry. The solutions they have come up with so far are crappy and unpredictable, and far from instant. Will they be able to come up with a real solution this time instead of dumping everything from RAM onto the disk and the back into RAM, which often takes just as long as it would to boot up normally? I’ll believe it when I see it.
RISC OS has been booting from ROM since 1987 !
The original version used to fit into 2MB of ROM, now it’s up to about 4MB. You get the GUI, four antialiased fonts, a vector graphics package, a bitmap graphics package, a simple editor, and a full multitasking OS into that space.
Some extra bits and pieces come on DISK, but you can live without them…
It boots in a few seconds (slightly longer if you tell it to load additional applications from disk).
Nice to see that the PC may be catching up some 16 years later !
The solution to this “problem” is fairly easy and I’m surprised why we still haven’t seen it:
Use a portable-like battery inside the Tower in order to put the computer into sleep mode automatically… You will not be able to work with it… Instead you will wait until the power comes back and click! Voila! The computer continues EXACTLY from where it was!
You know! Like an Apple portable where you close the lid and the video stops and when you open the lid the video continues exactly from where you left it… And it takes up to 4-5 secs TOPS :p
Apple rulez!
The solution to this “problem” is fairly easy and I’m surprised why we still haven’t seen it:
Use a portable-like battery inside the Tower in order to put the computer into sleep mode automatically… You will not be able to work with it… Instead you will wait until the power comes back and click! Voila! The computer continues EXACTLY from where it was!
You know! Like an Apple portable where you close the lid and the video stops and when you open the lid the video continues exactly from where you left it… And it takes up to 4-5 secs TOPS :p
Apple rulez!
The whole reason we do not have instant-on capability is because of the volitile RAM that we use… meaning once the electricity is cut off, everything in the RAM is erased.
What we need is non-volitile RAM. There is a solution that was announced a few years ago, and there was a recent article talking about it’s availability sometime next year for smaller devices, later on for regular PC’s. It’s called MRAM, magnetic random access memory… you should look it up.
Does anyone not remember the Atari ST computer? The operating system was entirely in ROM (called TOS). Of course, if you wanted to run a later version, you could always boot from disk. I never had an Atari virus wipe my OS. 😉 Maybe a floppy here and there…
If you want to speed the PC up, either give the option to eliminate POST (power-on self-test) or speed up POST. That’s a good bit of time wasted there. Or OSes that crash less frequently…
Lol that’s easy to fix you supply the RAM with it’s own independent power suppy, such as a battery that gets recharged every time the PC gets switched on. No more volatile memory, the computer boots as fast as you can blink.
I haven’t seen anybody doing this yet, maybe there is, but it’s certainly a cool workaround.
Q
What is this ‘reboot’ of which you speak?
Anon: That requires more power, which is something you want to avoid.
MRAM is definately the future.
well, you would only need enough space for the kernel.
I’m Sure 9mb for WIN98 or a few more MB wouldn’t be that much trouble to fit on a ROM cartridge.
Heck you could just use a Compact flash card and your computer would run for years as no mechanical parts could fail (well maybe the fans)
>>What is this ‘reboot’ of which you speak?
I think it is something you have to do once a year or so when you replace your kernel.
From time to time (about once a week) I restart X just to clean things out a little. It is like that, only more so.
I hope this helps – I’d hate for you to stay confused!
We should just wait 20 seconds For home/work users.
We will not see advantages because you boot up your
<type of computer> and do some work, play a game, surf
the net, master an evil plot for world dominance,then shut
down. You don’t just reboot and reboot and reboot….
Servers will see great advantage since Windows 2003 or
Linux will reboot in 120 seconds but the Data Base may
not be useful for 3600 seconds or longer if it needs to
be recoverd because alot of transactions were sill in a cache or being writen to disk if a ups fails with out sending a flush all caches command.
Does anyone remember what those ISA hardrive cards were called? I’m really wanting to put a stripped 98lite on one of those for an almost instant-on computer.
Why do you need an instant on computer? Just leave it on all the time. Your monitor goes into power save mode, and it’s like your computer is off (as long as there isnt too much fan noise, which can easily be taken care of).
Well, almost. OS X handles sleep mode very well, such that I never shut my computer down, just leave it in sleep mode, which basically turns everything off except supplying power to the RAM, meaning the computer is totally silent and unnoticeable, like its turned off.
The only thing that’s missing, is the ability for this to work with no power being supplied. Like was mentioned previously, this can be remedied if a battery was supplied that would have enough power to support sleep mode for a while.
All i can say is ITS ABOUT DAMN TIME
i have dreamed of having a 5 sec reboot computer like my Axim
A friend of mine has this SCSI card that has RAM on the card and mounted on that ram was this little rechargable battery. I was so pissed i was like why can’t they make this for a normal desktop ram slot and have some type of program that when you shutdown it dumps everthing to the ram or something like that. So the next time i pressed power i would be up and running right after the bios
I’ve worked as a software developer on these quick-start systems, and used them as an end user. My experience is that instant-on is a big mistake.
Today when your system gets flakey you reboot it and get a fresh start. When state information is saved across boots what you get is a system that will boot in a flakey state. When systems no longer actually boot but just enter a low-power state we will a see an increase is the frequency of users booting into Safe Mode (or the equivalent) to correct problems. When you want a clean start to your system you’ll have to yank the power cord and wait a few minutes for the capacitors to drain.
And what is this obsession with boot times? Microsoft jokes aside, just how often do you have to boot your computer anyway?
Steve: One could make a functionality that does a complete reboot, and one that does a quick boot.
Good point, why wont they just make the boot up process faster. Faster bioses would be better. my gentoo box boots up 10 seconds complete with xfce4 after the bios bootstrap which eats up more time.
Thats a very poor reflection on so called software engineers (any OS) that can’t create an OS that stays reasonably stable for extensive periods of time.
I reboot a couple of times a day because I need to do work in 2 diff OSes & I can’t afford to dup all the HW. Even if it were free, I still don’t want 2 PCs so I do want near instant boots. Funny thing is I just upgraded from 1GHz to 2400 XP and Windows2k & BeOS are both about 2x faster when active, but BeOS boots halved, & Windows boots got strange. 1 min to boot to blue background, then amazingly 1whole min to do nada, then the final desktop. WHAT the HELL is Windows doing during the blue screens??
Also there has always been some question as to whether HDs should stay spinning all the time or just power as you need. All ancient drives in mainframes & 1st gen PCs were always on, but the trend is clearly to spin as needed (MP3 boxen). HDs wear out mostly during the spinup. It doesn’t really matter any more since most HW gets replaced just before it would have worn out anyway so might as well push it to the edge.
As for flash you must all know how slow these devices actually are. They were designed as cheap nonvolatile storage for cameras etc. My newest Lexar USB2 flash is supposed to be super fast as flash goes, (ignore the USB2 part) but its still in the 3-5MBytes per sec, just like an old slow HD.
As for MRAM, or FerroRam or any other NV DRAM you might hear about, forget it, it will be too long coming, but could be used for NAND Flash replacement.
A Micron engineer told me that thet were working on getting the refresh cycles out, really out. DRAMs used to refresh every 2ms when they were 16K or so. Current refresh is still in the same ballpark because the physics has’t really changed much. He said they would be going into days with extremely low leakage jucntions that would make MRAM, even Flash irrelevant. The backup power follows directly the frequency of refresh, so stasis could become very low power.
gotta go
There are multiple ways to solve this problem, and some of this discussion assumes that “instant-on” only uses one of these approaches. For example, one approach that hasn’t been discussed is that instant-on may not have to do with resuming saved state, perhaps it has more to do with quick-boot. One thing that most operating systems do is a lot of hardware probing and dynamic setup. This is fine, as it copes with a wide variety of hardware. What the operating system support are multiple stages:
(1) full dynamic boot (i.e. complete probing + network setup + etc), and then a checkpoint at the end of this process to save “quick-boot state”;
(2) quick booting that uses “quick-boot state” to effective ghost restore a RAM image from the backing store (HDD) and a post quick-boot check (i.e. quick re-scan of hardware); the image size is limited to the size of the OS;
(3) the normal resume/restore that is like (2), but involves user space drivers / applications (i.e. more potential for flakiness – e.g. my current XP installation fails to preserve a bluetooth stack across “switch users” as an indication that not all device drivers are totally clean); the image size could be large: size of core memory + anything swapped out;
These assume volatile RAM, but as the discussion indicates, technologies like MRAM may also come into play eventually.
I’ve only been using Windows XP for the last month on a 2.4Ghz pentium, and actually I’m very impressed with the boot speed (not sure whether it’s the O/S or my improved hardware, including 7200rpm disk) as it seems to be moving forward. I would be surprised if a maintstream O/S like Windows doesn’t already include elements of the above (notably 2).
an Operating system that doesn’t take a gigbyte or more on its initial install (win2k) (3Gb in the case of xp)
Look at BeOS as an example, the R5pe install is less than 60Mb’s in its entirity, even on a standard udma hard disk that only about 3 secconds of access time to dump the entire lot to memory, to run and process however in a modern pc (athlon 2000) it only takes 7-8 secconds to start up.
The only reliable way to get fast booting quick running PCs is to have a efficiently coded OS that was designed to run on computers with much less kick but can scale up well.
These are not difficult things to work out yet these things are still not really implimented… I’m yet to find a real justification for a 3Gb OS (not including anything but a browser, email client video player and a few other misc apps for anything other than an enterprise sized server thats used in a mission critical situation.. certainly not a desktop.
Virtual PC has offered a partial answer to instant booting. When you exit Virtual PC you have the option of saving the current setup of the OS. The next time you ‘boot up’ Windows the program simply copies the saved image back into memory.
My booting of XP, using the saved state, takes about 30 seconds to load from the hard drive. This is a simple use of existing hardware helped along with some software. It works.
If one wants almost ‘zero’ time for booting then you need something faster than the hard drive for saving the image. Note, this saving is not automatic. If you crash the system will reboot from scratch.
Gee, someone has already done it.