Boot Time

[jmeh]

Hi,

Apologies if this has come up before, but do we know anything about the boot time of the pandora yet? I only ask because I saw a video of the new openmoko phone booting today and it took ages - about 2 mins. I know linux boot times can vary massively so I just wondered how fast the dev boards booted up from cold?

Thanks,

Jme

 

[ingrin]

Hi,

Apologies if this has come up before, but do we know anything about the boot time of the pandora yet? I only ask because I saw a video of the new openmoko phone booting today and it took ages - about 2 mins. I know linux boot times can vary massively so I just wondered how fast the dev boards booted up from cold?

Thanks,

Jme

The general consensus is 'who cares' since the battery lasts 10 hours of normal use and the device can go into suspend mode for several days.

 

[Frank Grimes]

As long as it's shorter than Windows XP, I'm happy

 

[Kyo]

seeing as how this is a handheld console and not a PC, I can imagine they're trying to keep it down because it will surely be used for a quick gaming session or as MP3 player, which would be unbearable with a loading time of several minutes.

 

[cb88]

well there are acouple arm SoCs that boot in under a second to 2 seconds to the command line and take a few more to load X.... in the case of those that do have X

hopefully they can cut out the stuff that is not needed from the kernel and optimise it pretty heavily even if they don't someone probably will... by optimising im refering to not probing uneeded kernel modules and not actually changeing kernel code... also i find that debian loads way too many services... that are really worthless at least in the desktop versions i imagine the custom pandora os won't do that...

perhaps a boot option could be set so that it boot without probing any drivers and only loads the defaults and running some of the boot processes concurrently could really help too... as linux can be booted from a cd to X in less than 10 seconds on a 600mhz P2 sothat is petty impressive

personnaly i thing that a device like pandora should boot really fast... no more than 15 seconds and that is probably too long i mean puppylinux can boot from cd in about 45-60 seconds and it has to probe disks and drivers and whatnot.... the pandora shouldn't have to do any of that if im thinking right....

 

[Megamixman]

The thing to remeber is that
1.) the kernel will likey be optimized
2.) Most likely all the modules will be built in
3.) We won't need fancy init scripts that can adjust to different hardware

So basically 80% of the avg linux system's boot time is gone due to the fact that you have a fixed hardware platform. Getting near instant on is quite possible. It will definately take some work though.

 

[yosh64]

hey

I hope it takes no more than 10 seconds to boot, I'd like it to take even less, hehe. But yea, I dunno how realistic this is :\.

That way, instead of grabbing my calculator todo some calculations I can grab the pandora instead, or other such things, hehe.

cyas

 

[WizardStan]

That way, instead of grabbing my calculator todo some calculations I can grab the pandora instead, or other such things, hehe.

And instead of a tack hammer, I'll re-upholster my couch with a sledge! Brilliant!

 

[yosh64]

hey

I'm not sure what you are saying, and I'm not sure I want to know, hehe.

Anyhows if I end up getting a pandora I'd like to make a graphical calculator program, and other handy things.

cyas

 

[waffles]

That way, instead of grabbing my calculator todo some calculations I can grab the pandora instead, or other such things, hehe.

And instead of a tack hammer, I'll re-upholster my couch with a sledge! Brilliant!

No no no, the pandora can re-upholster also.
just follow the 72 step guide!
once you learn it, it only takes 30 hours!

 

[Esn]

The general consensus is 'who cares' since the battery lasts 10 hours of normal use and the device can go into suspend mode for several days.

There was a general consensus, really? Personally, I'm also hoping for less than 10 seconds. Less than 5 would be best...

Long bootups are annoying, more so on a portable device.

 

[Sphinxter]

I think 10 seconds if booting all services in parallel is not too far out of reach if you're not killing time, coldplugging, checking filesystems, dhcp groping, listening for an access point and such. Kick the tires and light the fires ready to play should be relatively quick.

 

[Kyo]

I could absolutely live with 10 seconds

 

[Chip]

The general consensus is 'who cares' since the battery lasts 10 hours of normal use and the device can go into suspend mode for several days.

There was a general consensus, really? Personally, I'm also hoping for less than 10 seconds. Less than 5 would be best...

Long bootups are annoying, more so on a portable device.


I think people are confusing boot up times with resume time. Instant-on devices like cell phones and PDAs are not instant-on because they have fast boot times. They are instant-on because they never really shut down. I own two cell phones and the actual boot time for both is nearly a minute. However, you only have to sit through the boot process if you remove the battery or there is a severe system crash.

Just like a cell phone, the Pandora can suspend to RAM or suspend to disk when not in use and resume within a few seconds. Unless you're going to be away from external power for a week or more, just have your Pandora suspend to RAM when you close the lid. When you open the lid, it will resume almost instantaneously.

 

[cb88]

no chip i was not confusing boot times with suspend to ram... booting on the pandora should be a lot faster than booting a PC at least if configured properly

cell phones don't usually run linux either... mostly vxworks or some other proprietary os... one thing that the arm boards do is boot into an initial ram disk and that is really fast... then mount the drives as soon as possible in the boot process so the boot can continue starting programs that aren't in the ramdisk

infact booting might actually be faster than resuming from a disk image (it all depends we'll just have to see).... however not from ram..

 

[Megamixman]

considering how much battery booting usually eats on things like cell phones, i would probably prefer a slow more effecient boot if possible

 

[A_SN]

Wow, this entire thread needs a clue like there's no tomorrow. Why should the boot time be any longer than the GP2X's? As for the actual boot time, I'm sure it's been mentionned already, just search through the few tens of thousands of posts regarding the Pandora!

 

[Sphinxter]

Wow, this entire thread needs a clue like there's no tomorrow. Why should the boot time be any longer than the GP2X's? As for the actual boot time, I'm sure it's been mentionned already, just search through the few tens of thousands of posts regarding the Pandora!

Why 4.x should be no slower than 2.x then. Tough to calculate something that's not finished.

 

[Svartalf]

The general consensus is 'who cares' since the battery lasts 10 hours of normal use and the device can go into suspend mode for several days.

There was a general consensus, really? Personally, I'm also hoping for less than 10 seconds. Less than 5 would be best...

Long bootups are annoying, more so on a portable device.

Indeed.

Having said this, if it boots within 30 seconds, it ought to be okay. Boot time on much of the consumer electronics devices out there with an OS is between 15 and 45 seconds. The N800 I have does it in about 30 or so. Same with the eeePC. Smaller times aren't overall practical or doable with an OS on there. 5 seconds would be a dedicated device without anything but a single function task on something like VxWorks or similar. 10 might be doable, but I'd be believing 15-20 would be the fastest for bringing up things on this machine with a Linux image. I'd be gunning for 10, but won't be disappointed if it's as much as 30 based on what I know about the embedded space and current devices in that space.

 

[Chip]

booting on the pandora should be a lot faster than booting a PC at least if configured properly.

The point I was trying to make is that whether it takes 3 sec. or 3 min. to boot is completely irrelevant from a daily usage perspective. Maybe it will be faster than the GP2X, maybe it will be much slower. Either way it won't affect your ability to use the device on the go. You won't actually be booting up every time you whip out your Pandora to play a quick game.