Intel Moblin V2 Core Alpha: It Boots Fast!

[sreyan]

Just got the image today from http://moblin.org/ and the bootup is everything that was promised on my Aspire One; Booting even from a live-usb is so much faster then my copy of Ubuntu 8.10 on the built in ssd.

http://moblin.org/community/blogs/tshureih/2009/announcing-moblin-v2-core-alpha-release

even with the live-usb it's maybe a 7 or 8 second boot!

My only criticism is that it might be helped by using XFCE 4.6 RC and by including Midori instead of a minefield build of firefox. I heartily recommend that other users with netbooks at least give it a try. I would love to see some of the main stream distros pick up this sort of speed

[phoronix]

Intel Moblin V2 Core Alpha: It Boots Fast!

Phoronix: Intel Moblin V2 Core Alpha: It Boots Fast!

Intel has been at the forefront of producing hardware for netbooks and other mobile devices thanks to their Atom processor family, but they are also looking at being a key part of the mobile software ecosystem. Back in 2007 we witnessed the launch of the Moblin project, which is Intel's open-source venture for creating a complete stack of software for these mobile devices. Originally, the Moblin core was based upon Ubuntu, but Intel ended up rebasing off Fedora last year and they have been preparing for the second version of their core operating system. Just this week they released Moblin V2 Core Alpha, which we are looking at in this article. Specifically, we are looking at how fast this Intel software is able to boot!

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13439

[ethana2]

What would I have to make sure of when buying a laptop so that it can boot without initrd? No proprietary drivers, right? Any bios or mainboard things to look out for?

[sreyan]

Could a mod please merge http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15086 into this thread?

[Michael]

Could a mod please merge http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15086 into this thread?

Done, thanks

[hubick]

I bought a Panasonic CF-U1 MID, based on Intel's Atom/Menlow platform, thinking the Intel graphics would be actively supported like my desktop. Little did I know that they don't use the "regular" Intel driver, but a separate one provided just to Moblin. Well, turns out that driver was a code dump which hasn't been touched in almost a year and doesn't work with any recent X.org or kernel (and old kernels apparently don't support my hard drive controller).

I tried Moblin, grabbed their image builder from GIT, went through the whole thing, and all I got was an image which gave me a bunch of errors and a kernel panic before ever even making it into the installer. I filed a bug ( http://bugzilla.moblin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197 ), and here we are two months later without so much as a peep out of Moblin.

And while I'm ranting... Wanting to install Linux on it, I searched around before buying the CF-U1 in September and found that Emperor Linux was selling them with Linux pre-installed. Taking this as a good sign for compatibility, I made the purchase ($2800 Cdn, NOT cheap). Still having had no luck, I search the Moblin list for hints when I have some time over Christmas, and see a post from an Emperor Linux dev in December asking for any clues how to get the CF-U1 working with Linux! So, they advertised the thing on their site with Linux pre-installed, having never done it before, and having no clue if they could actually get it working! Gah.

In case you are curious, I am chronicling my attempt here: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=201018

[sreyan]

I bought a Panasonic CF-U1 MID, based on Intel's Atom/Menlow platform, thinking the Intel graphics would be actively supported like my desktop. Little did I know that they don't use the "regular" Intel driver, but a separate one provided just to Moblin. Well, turns out that driver was a code dump which hasn't been touched in almost a year and doesn't work with any recent X.org or kernel (and old kernels apparently don't support my hard drive controller).

I tried Moblin, grabbed their image builder from GIT, went through the whole thing, and all I got was an image which gave me a bunch of errors and a kernel panic before ever even making it into the installer. I filed a bug ( http://bugzilla.moblin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197 ), and here we are two months later without so much as a peep out of Moblin.

And while I'm ranting... Wanting to install Linux on it, I searched around before buying the CF-U1 in September and found that Emperor Linux was selling them with Linux pre-installed. Taking this as a good sign for compatibility, I made the purchase ($2800 Cdn, NOT cheap). Still having had no luck, I search the Moblin list for hints when I have some time over Christmas, and see a post from an Emperor Linux dev in December asking for any clues how to get the CF-U1 working with Linux! So, they advertised the thing on their site with Linux pre-installed, having never done it before, and having no clue if they could actually get it working! Gah.

In case you are curious, I am chronicling my attempt here: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=201018

I think that MID uses the atom Z series plus US15W chipset. The US15W chipset has the GMA 500 which is really a PowerVR SGX graphics core.

In terms of both power consumption and processing ability it's a huge upgrade, but there are only proprietary drivers available.

The drivers are available from intels website and I think most mainstream distros have some support for poulsbo now.

[GreatWalrus]

Ok, I don't think I've ever seen a pc boot that fast (of course, i haven't tried searching youtube for "extremely fast boot" ). That was amazing to me.

I can't wait to upgrade my laptop with an AMD Turion 64 x2 1.6ghz to a desktop with a 45nm quad core processor and hopefully see differences as big as this.

[RealNC]

And I thought my 20 seconds from Grub to X were fast :P

[GreatWalrus]

And I thought my 20 seconds from Grub to X were fast :P

And I thought 20 seconds to my Grub was fast. :P