@instant on

if (no anykey pressed) goto turboboot
else do normal (old school) bootup.

turboboot:
-Load kickstart (from onboard flash) in parallel with HW detecting
-After kickstart is loaded and HW detected, launch kickstart

Where's the hard part?



For me the instant on means 1 second +- 1 second. (imagine 3s starts to be very doable on modern custom HW and legacy HDD spin up times)
Above 5 seconds is the playground of future non-amigas, right?

Soft reset should be targeted to happen below one second on 1Ghz+ CPUs.

As long as there is no effort put in boot time optimization, we loose some of the advantage of our custom HW (pretty fixed) setups. We do not modify our HW setup every time we power on/off. If we want (for example) system to boot from DVD, we can hold down anybutton to inform the bios/kickstart what to do.
And everyday HW modders can set "always do slow boot" -option.

Amigans should do their own next gen BIOS for the turboboot. If we rely on mainstream booting process, we end up being slow on below 3Ghz (etc.) HW.
Mainstream BIOS functionality (UBoot or whatever) can be there for backup/failsafe booting.

When we have ultra fast booting, we have one advantage over the mainstream. We would not "need" hibernation or sleep at all, cold reboot is always safer way to bring up the system (also in mainstream).

Another thing: sleep
When we use embedded CPUs in our systems, we should explore how low the power usage can be put in idle mode. When mainstream systems are in "sleep" they anyway consume several watts of power. I imagine our embedded HW might be able to reach similar low power situation in idle state (still running anyway). Then the "wakeup" would only take microseconds on our devices.
Today amigadevices are going mobile (MOS to PowerBook, AOS4 to netbook, AROS is already there), so, power saving features are needed now.

My daily pain:
"Some organizations (mainly large enterprises) mandate automatic hibernation (e.g. as a network policy) if a computer system has been idle for a certain amount of time, mainly as an energy saving measure. This saves some energy at the cost of some lost productivity waiting for the state to be restored."
Wiki about hibernation etc.

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@gonegahgah

Quote:

Does all the hardware detection have to be done immediately. Can't the user system be brought up primarily and hardware detection be completed as a lower priority process. Couldn't a micro-kernel appear to boot up instantly if the focus was on getting the user up and running?

Which bits would you leave out?

The hardisks? oh no users needs them
The monitor / graphics? ermm not much uses without that
the usb stack? user needs to input

that's most of the job done, network could come up a bit later, I'm not sure what else we have.

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@broadblues

And that's 3 things which isn't many. How long does it take a hard drive to wind up or a graphics card to warm up or a usb stack to initialise? The system could perhaps remember what it had last time, check if these are still present and talking, and if it is presume that it is correct so that the last set up loads. If something important is not present then it can go through a longer process to see what the system is now. Also, if something better or additional is added then it can adjust itself later too. Isn't this possible?

Last edited by gonegahgah on 30-Apr-2012 at 01:59 PM.
Last edited by gonegahgah on 30-Apr-2012 at 01:58 PM.

@gonegahgah

Those probaly don't take too long, judging by my usb.log usb starts in about 6 seconds, including adding al hubs and mouse / keyboard / printer.


everything else is in user-startup / wbstartup.

You want a faster reboot then, perhaps try minimalising those.

The simpler the system is the faster it'll reboot but it might end too simple to be useful.

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@KimmoK

Quote:

Where's the hard part?

The libs in kickstart do that hardware detecting and setup at the os level so you can't do that in parallel.

Except the extent that as the libraries load they will (and probably do allready I don't know for sure) start doing their business.

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@gonegahgah

Quote:

Does all the hardware detection have to be done immediately. Can't the user system be brought up primarily and hardware detection be completed as a lower priority process. Couldn't a micro-kernel appear to boot up instantly if the focus was on getting the user up and running?

The problem is that the user needs pretty much everything like keyboard, gfx card, harddisks.

What I think could speed up the "BIOS" part is to initialize all HW in parallel instead of doing it one by one and waiting for each device to be finished. And also to allow more distinct harddisk testing to one can prevent it from waiting for slow CD-devices and sleeping disks. Only test the device I have told it to test, then boot immediately from it, with or without gfx card having finished initializing yet (since they are initialized in parallel).

Harddisks are the slowest IMO, or well CDs of course. USB for keyboard (which is the only thing needed at bootup) should be rather instant. The bootup minimal USB stack should of course only scan for a keyboard and stop immediately it finds one, unless you told it to search for bootable USB devices of course.

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@Mechanic
Quote:

Sounds like an effort to change a computer into an appliance.

In fact, the trend is the reverse. My Amiga already boots faster than my HP all-in-one printer, my SONY blueray player and my wireless router. Even my new car radio takes longer to boot if I have a USB flash drive plugged into it. I wonder how long it will be before we have to wait for our cars to boot before we can drive them

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@Xenic

Quote:

I wonder how long it will be before we have to wait for our cars to boot before we can drive them

We already do have to wait. Back when we got injection engines it got from about 0.2 seconds to 1 second and I hated it. Now you actually have to hold the key there for a while. A (warm) carburator car in good shape only needs one cylinder to ignite and it would start and that happened very soon after the starter motor started turning which meant you could just flip the key.

Now there are self-checks and intro demos in the speedometer display and all kinds of crap taking much longer. So far I think you can skip most of it by just turning the key and go though.

Apart from cars, I *really* don't understand how hardware can be so extremely slow to initialize. There are hundreds of milliseconds here and there and everywhere adding up to a whole lot of annoying seconds. I mean voltage stabilators and all that ####, it just isn't that slow. Harddisks I can understand because they are mechanical and need to spin up. But that's it.

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@Deniil715

as you say, the milliseconds add up. The fact that ALL computers take time to initialize PCI and USB devices should tell you that initializing those takes time.

Not having to do spin up of harddrives in the bootloader would cut down a ton of time (the kernel is able to multitask, the bootloader isn't), but if it was possible to do without USB support that might help a little too. I don't know how much, though.

To get to USB you need to first enumerate PCI to find the USB controller(s), followed by a scan for input devices on USB the chain(s). Already that's potentially a lot of things to do. But WAY less than the time it takes to spin up a drive.

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@Deniil715

Yeah, in parallel absolutely. You don't want to wait on slow things before you start finding the fast things. Would mean the need for some sort of signalling and multitasking in the bios.

When it comes to devices, if they do self-testing, then only vital testing could be done initially with a more thorough check done later. Memory testing may be an example.

I guess if when we get cheap non-volatile RAM for the whole system then it can pretty much restart where it was - though still checking the state of the system.

Can you imagine waiting for a Canon printer in the chain. It would take ages before the OS actually began to load.

I think the OS loading can be made a lot better too. A microkernel would allow more-so the important parts to load faster and to allow the user to start using quicker. I imagine that QNX probably starts fairly quickly; though I've never used it.

@thread

I wonder if there are other things than Fast Boot or Instant On that users would like to see in Aos 4.2

Here's my list:

Graphic subsystem:

OpenGL - integrated with the system
Cairo 1.12.2 (1.14 is coming)
Picasso96 remove or enhanced (maybe enhanced could be good for compatibility)
New composition engine features.

General OS improvements
SMP
Multicore support

Other
Drivers for Xena and sample code
Updated FPGA support
Updated SDK (with c++ framework?)
Content and Extra directory in the Install CD (backgrounds, sounds)

I thought it was what you could do with it that counts not how quickly you could.... boot...

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@Derfs

Quote:

Derfs wrote: @Darth_X you should be banned for that sick "joke"

I forget what I posted.

edit: nevermind, I just remembered.

Last edited by Darth_X on 05-May-2012 at 06:22 AM.

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@AmigaBlitter

Comment from the core developers would be really appreciated

@AmigaBlitter

Mmmmnnn, trifle.. http://youtu.be/G3IgFsEEOik

@danwood

Well, i have to admit that i look like Homer while waiting Amiga news

... and... have to say that "trifle" is not the original "word" i had in mind.

Trifle was intended as "Little thing", ("piccola cosa, sciocchezzuola") in italian with a feeling meaning.

paying closer attention to the term, i understood that this word can be misunderstood.

So, sorry for this. I modified the title adding "Little big thing" to explain it better.

Last edited by AmigaBlitter on 22-Jun-2012 at 09:21 AM.

@olegil

Quote:

olegil wrote: @sundown Instant on is impossible, as peripherals need to be detected and initialized. This is gonna take more time than "instant". ...

So you say switching on an old C64 or CBM 610 was not "instant on"?

My old CBM 620 immediately displayed "Commodore Basic 4.0 ready." after switching it on.
Thats what I thought was "instant on".

And now you say instant is impossible...hmmmm...

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@gonegahgah

Quote:

gonegahgah wrote: @olegil ... Couldn't a micro-kernel appear to boot up instantly if the focus was on getting the user up and running?

What?
You have to stand up and start to run when you switch on the computer?

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If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
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@gonegahgah

I don't know if a very fast boot can be considered a priority @ the moment. There are other features that need attention.

@AmigaBlitter

There is, btw, a roughly estimated realese date for the 4.2?