Intel Moblin V2 Alpha 2: It Boots Even Faster!

[Kano]

You know that fastboot was diabled by default for 2.6.29? You need fastboot option to force it. Maybe 2.6.30 will have got a working implementation.

[clickwir]

Can someone point me to a good explanation of how they are able to do this? I'd love to read some more about it.

What they are doing... can it, eventually, make it's way to other distros?

[ssam]

Rebooting the machine means losing all the caches. I don't like that. After a reboot, it takes a while for the system to perform as well as with warmed caches. That's why I view boot time optimizations as a workaround for suspend.

try preload. it warms your caches up in the background.

[MaestroMaus]

Ubuntu 8.10 on a Dell XPS M1710 here.
Everything (and I really mean everything) works almost out of the box. The only thing that isn't standard is the new NVIDIA closed source notebook driver (180.29).

[Melf]

I can report working suspend(standard through pm-utils) and hibernation (directly through s2disk) on my laptop.
It is asus f3jr running Ubuntu 8.10 and 0SS ati driver v. 6.12.1 and I have not had any problems considering suspend/hibernation for quite a while.

[Veerappan]

That's why I view boot time optimizations as a workaround for suspend.

I agree, to a point. Warm caches, and also the time saved by not re-launching all the various daemons is very nice to have.

But consider this: If you're dual-booting a machine, and share a data partition between the various OS installations, hibernation is a very bad idea (leads to possible disk corruption when you've got multiple OSes trying to modify a filesystem). In this case, hibernate only works when you boot the machine back up to the same OS that you were last running. If you want to switch OSes, boot/shutdown times definitely matter. I find myself in this situation on my laptop quite a bit. I work on code in Ubuntu, then switch to WinXP for whatever nefarious purposes I use it for, then maybe switch back to Linux later. If my laptop supported hardware virtualization, more than 2GB RAM, and had faster I/O, I'd definitely be looking into running a windows or linux VM.

If you've only got the one OS installed, then hibernation is fine, unless you have a large amount of memory which takes forever to write/read to/from disk, and you are ok with saving/reopening your programs.

[RealNC]

Rebooting the machine means losing all the caches. I don't like that. After a reboot, it takes a while for the system to perform as well as with warmed caches. That's why I view boot time optimizations as a workaround for suspend.

[BlackStar]

No, because suspend to disk doesn't consume energy. It shuts down completely. It then resumes from the image saved on the swap partition.

People do this on Windows. It's too useful to live without, even if Windows has very fast boot times. Fast booting is a workaround for suspend bugs, NOT the other way around.

Ever tried to suspend to disk with 8 gigs of RAM? Try it, it's fun. Not to mention the 8GB swap partition you need just to get it to work (slight exaggeration, but compression can only do so much).

Suspend to ram/disk is a workaround for slow boot times. I'd very much prefer a real solution myself.

[mdmadph]

http://moblin.org/documentation/test-drive-moblin

Thanks! I had seen that, but I didn't know one could use a .IMG file like a .ISO, but I've since downloaded it, and it seems to work pretty well.

[Michael]

Anybody know where to get the ISO? I got one of the alpha 1 release, so I know they're out there, but I couldn't find a link for it on the Moblin site.

http://moblin.org/documentation/test-drive-moblin