Linux boots in 2.97 seconds
SOFTWARE ENGINEERS at Japan's embedded Linux software vendor Lineo announced technology last week that can boot a low-power computer system within 2.97 seconds, the company claims.
Lineo calls its quick-start software system Warp 2, apparently either never having heard of IBM's ill-fated and abandoned OS/2 Warp operating system or not being particularly superstitious.
The company says Warp 2 consists of a bootloader, a customised Linux software stack, and a 'hibernation driver' similar to familiar suspend-to-disk software. Lineo's innovation is that its hibernation driver writes a snapshot of RAM into flash memory instead of to a hard disk.
The Warp 2 implementation is reportedly able to save multiple alternative system snapshots to enable rebooting either into a clean startup environment or to a previously saved session.
The hibernation driver is also capable of compressing the saved RAM image by about 50 per cent, depending upon what it contains. One of its demonstration tests reduced a 32MB RAM image to 19MB, Lineo claims.
In benchmark tests using an ARM CPU, a small low-power system running Warp 2 – with Linux, an X display subsystem, the tiny window manager twm and three xterm command line shells – booted an uncompressed 18.3MB RAM image in 2.97 seconds. Reportedly the system booted the same test suite from a compressed 6.8MB RAM image in 3.17 seconds.
Nearly instant-on Linux based systems are becoming common throughout the PC industry.
ASUS announced last May that it had begun preloading a BIOS flash embedded Linux and web browser system, called Express Gate, with all of the computer motherboards it ships.
That technology is based on DeviceVM Splashtop, which HP and Lenovo are reportedly also adopting. Dell Latitude On is a Montavista Linux system that runs on a separate ARM CPU. Not to be outdone, Toshiba and Intervideo have Linux based quick-boot systems too.
Moreover, the best-selling segment of the PC market now is netbooks – lightweight, small notebook style PCs that can handle light web browsing, email, photos and even streaming audio and video, practically as well as larger laptop and desktop PCs. Reportedly up to 25 per cent of netbooks run Linux, and Linux based fast-boot technology is ideally suited for the way people use those systems.
After all, no one needs to lug around a bulky laptop loaded down with heavyweight legacy software just to wibble the web, manage their email and photos, use their work-related, cloud-based software applications, and keep up with their social not-working addictions.
Less than two weeks ago Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, took note of all these developments and predicted that Linux will outship Windows next year.
That's not only possible but likely, we think, given that it looks like Linux will be shipping on a lot of PCs that are also loaded with Windows, and considering the better reliability and security, ease of use, and lower costs of Linux based systems, especially on netbooks.
The giant Vole of Redmond seems to be turning into an aging, slow dinosaur, surrounded by a quickly growing population of faster, smaller, and more agile little Linux mammals. µ
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Seriously, you guys are reminding me of Fred Phelps, that crazy nutty pastor of some sect in Kansas that hates the world, fags, Swedes etc.. You use the same kind of circular arguments, compare apples to pears and sometimes just invent stuff for the sake of dropping turds on Microsoft. 

"Lineo's innovation is that its hibernation driver writes a snapshot of RAM into flash memory instead of to a hard disk."

It doesn't take long for my PC to wake up from Sleep. It does take longer than 2.97 seconds, perhaps 5-6 seconds, but then I have 4GB RAM in my PC which explains that. Oh, forgot, I'm not running a gimped OS specifically tailored for flashdrive-to-RAM usage on specially built hardware. ^^
Dare to dream. :-/
I just love the level of bias on these sites... 

To me this just seems like a logical extension of the hibernate function that has been in windows for years.
...Is that nobody has brought "rapid resume" in the MS fashion to Linux -- seems there really hasn't been enough interest on the desktop to fund a project.

You can take a full hibernation image, and the kernel itself tends to live in an initramfs that does a good job of making the initial boot one big serial read from disk, but I have yet to see a distro offering to take an image up to gdm or, on a "single-user" system, to the initial desktop login.

You'd think that'd have some serious advantages for desktop/laptop usage. Perhaps we'll see more of it when SSDs are more common and people can see what bottlenecks still exist even with the miracle disks. (Note some of the optimization work already done on GNOME and KDE startup, where big speedups were found by not letting programs block. Also contrast the old days of Windows, where a booting system could hang for minutes waiting for DHCP.)
Since when has "rapid resume" or hibernation or wake up from sleep be the same as booting?

Most of the posters above seem to know f-all about anything.

Any body who has waited for a windows box to come out of hibernation on a machine with 3gigs of ram knows it takes longer than a cold boot.

Dell Inspiron use Windows XP with Cryberlink to fast boot. They use hybernate.
Say "Lineo ARM netbook" boots in less than three seconds. The "linux" part seems entirely incidental to this story, although I guess the Inquirer has to explain to some what rebooting "into a clean startup environment" means. No version of Windows has this. "A logical extension of the hibernate function???" Are these guys getting paid to come up with this crap? Do they think M$ fandom is any less disgusting than linux fanboyism? Dumb responses to a dumb story.
scyphe: Sleep? As in "hibernation" they are talking about? 5-6 seconds for 4GB? Really? That would be about 1GBps transfer rate from your disk or SSD. I kinda have trouble believing it (especially on a notebook). The other option (standby) is a different thing from what they are talking about. You can't do a poweroff for this. That 2.97 is from power-off state.

Walking around with big, heavy, expensive, shock-sensitive bricks, which are nowhere near as powerful as serious desktop, nor have sufficient screen size and resolution, is a matter of preference, but for example I prefer small netbook for ultimate portability and battery life, and desktop for serious work. So do many, many other people. Such an arrangement is more effective than having a single notebook for almost the same amount of money.
Great! Linux always outperformed others.

>To me this just seems like a logical extension of the hibernate function that has been in windows for years.

To me you just don't know what is in above article... Hibernate function was in Linux for years too... It looks that closed source closes brains of its users...