How Kernel Hackers Boosted the Speed of Desktop Linux 380
chromatic writes "Kernel hackers Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok showed off Linux booting in five seconds at last month's Linux Plumbers Conference. Arjan and other hackers have already improved the Linux user experience by reducing power consumption and latency. O'Reilly News interviewed him about his work on improving the Linux experience with PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot."
Re:Does it matter? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure how everyone else uses their computer but I only need to boot my Linux machine about once every 30-60 days.
Some people like to power down their computers to stop them from wasting energy at night.
How they sleep without the sweet, sweet sound of fans running though leaves me dumbstruck.
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:5, Funny)
Kudos to you sir, for reducing the time it takes to type congratulations by instead using grats!
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:4, Funny)
On an old Pentium III laptop... (Score:5, Funny)
My stepfather still has an old Pentium III laptop with Windows 95 running on it. Booting the laptop to read an E-mail takes around 20 minutes. His advice to anyone who wants to use it, "switch on the PC, do something else like have a bath, do the lawn, read the newspaper, or have a coffee, and the PC will be ready to use before you know it".
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:2, Funny)
Heck, be generous, give him more than one. Kudoi to him!
Re:TFA (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Funny)
But at least someone, somewhere can boot linux in 5 seconds.
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, Safe Mode.
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:3, Funny)
if SMART is complaining about an immanent disk failure I'd *really* like to know.
An immanent [askoxford.com] disk? Computers really are getting everywhere.
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:3, Funny)
I prefer 'c13s'.
Get out of my lawn! (Score:4, Funny)
CP/M was probably OK but my Zilog-based PC had floppies only so it sucked too.
MS-DOS 3.0 was up and running in 1-2 seconds (assuming you had a hard drive and empty config.sys and autexec.bat).
Then MS rewrote DOS in that punky and slow new language "C" and since then everything went down. The next thing you see is that HIGHMEM.SYS driver taking your precious memory out of 640KB for the promise of semi-useless XMS memory for overlays. Oh well...
Now my kernel sits during boot on 4GB RAM looking for un-present USB devices and waiting for eth0 to figure out DHCP.
I guess Bill Gates was right and 640KB is right amount for everybody so OS would not get confused with all those amounts of bits laying around.
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:3, Funny)
none of your penis pills around here, sir!
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:3, Funny)
Kudos to you sir, for reducing the time it takes to type congratulations by instead using grats!
Using 'grats' is pretty amateurish though: real Slash-users lubricate their keyboards with GRITS for optimum performance.
Re:Get out of my lawn! (Score:2, Funny)
I had to wait for rusty IBM 2314 spin-up for 40 minutes, you insensitive clod! And it was a respectable Thermador fridge-sized thing, not your desktop thingy!
And it had a separate fridge-size controller with many blinking lights!
How many blinking lights your Commodore has? Eh? Eh?
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, the old, "I have discovered a truly marvelous method to improve Linux which the margins of my free time are too narrow to allow me to code."
Still keep writing.
Re:TFA (Score:3, Funny)
Access is a steaming turd that should be taken out back for a bullet in the head.
I cannot express in words how much I hate access. I work/develop with microsoft tech all day, and I don't mind most of it, but access is a big bowl of shit.
calling it a "spreadsheet used as a database" offends me. spreadsheets aren't that bad.
IMHO, microsoft makes some pretty good stuff. Parts of vista are pretty good, .Net is very good, SQL Server is very good.
Unfortunately for them their reputation is then tarnished by completely shit products like windows 9x, access and others I don't want to think about right now.
I've got a mate who works mainly with oracle. He needed to do something quickly and access didn't cut the mustard so I said try sql server.
It took me a long time to get him out of the mindset that sql server was just a bigger brother to access.
Anyway, I go on, but maybe microsoft wouldn't it so hard to be taken seriously in some places if they stopped bringing out shite like access.
Re:Should lead to possibly great advertisements (Score:4, Funny)