View Full Version : Intel Moblin V2 Alpha 2: It Boots Even Faster!
phoronix
03-25-2009, 11:00 AM
Phoronix: Intel Moblin V2 Alpha 2: It Boots Even Faster!
Back in January Intel had pushed out its first alpha release for Moblin V2. This Intel-optimized Linux distribution targeting systems with Intel Atom hardware was quite unique and offered a number of advantages for being a netbook-oriented operating system. Particularly special about Intel Moblin V2 was its boot-time, which was extremely fast when using a Solid-State Drive. Intel has now put out a second alpha release for Moblin V2, which we are briefly exploring today.
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13623
Louise
03-25-2009, 11:10 AM
I think we have Vista to thank for Intel's strong interest and push for Linux.
Let's just hope that Windows 7 won't run on XP class hardware.
puelocesar
03-25-2009, 11:19 AM
It's just a pity it doesn't run on my Eee 701 :(
RealNC
03-25-2009, 11:53 AM
Am I the only one to consider boot times useless? I can't even remember when I've shut down my laptop anymore. I just close the lid and it suspends.
Wasted effort IMO.
jeffro-tull
03-25-2009, 12:17 PM
@RealNC:
yeah, you might be.
Not all of us have hardware that has perfect suspend/resume support. Like my Aspire One. Some distros suspend and don't wake up (openSUSE). Some suspend and wake fine, but have issues with attached devices such as the SD card slot(s) (such as Arch and I think Ubuntu 8.10, don't recall).
It might be fixed by now (or not), but my Thinkpad T60 had issues waking from suspend as well. In Windows XP and plenty of Linux distributions, the graphics chipset (using Catalyst/fglrx) wouldn't come back properly.
So, yeah, boot times are important. Would I rather see work on better suspend/resume support? Sure. But if that's not getting top billing, then I'm more than happy to see boot times get sliced.
@puelocesar
Did you try? It basically runs on much more systems than specified.
puelocesar
03-25-2009, 12:30 PM
@RealNC:
Battery life doesn't lasts forever.. Suspend/Resume is just a workaround for the slow boot time problem, but not a solution. I would rather have fast/instant boot times then workarounds like suspend
And IMO that thing of letting computers ON all the time is a *HUGE* waste of energy. You people that do this have ever stopped to think on the energetic/environmental problems that this causes?
puelocesar
03-25-2009, 12:40 PM
@puelocesar
Did you try? It basically runs on much more systems than specified.
Well.. they say it doesn't work because it's not an SSSE3 capable processor (Celeron M)
From the requirements page:
* CPU: Intel Atom or Intel(r) Core(tm) 2 CPU (support for SSSE3)
Note: Moblin will not work on non-SSSE3 CPUs
Well there are Celeron-M with SSE3, did you check?
grep -o sse3 /proc/cpuinfo
RealNC
03-25-2009, 12:51 PM
@RealNC:
Battery life doesn't lasts forever.. Suspend/Resume is just a workaround for the slow boot time problem, but not a solution. I would rather have fast/instant boot times then workarounds like suspend
And IMO that thing of letting computers ON all the time is a *HUGE* waste of energy. You people that do this have ever stopped to think on the energetic/environmental problems that this causes?
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.
puelocesar
03-25-2009, 01:01 PM
Well there are Celeron-M with SSE3, did you check?
grep -o sse3 /proc/cpuinfo
Well, based on the comments on Moblin site apparently not:
http://moblin.org/documentation/test-drive-moblin/using-moblin-live-image#comment-152
(i'm not with my eee right now)
puelocesar
03-25-2009, 01:08 PM
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.
Oh, you were talking about suspend to disk.. Well, I only saw this working one time on my entire life, so I presumed nobody used it, sorry..
I think the very concept of boot we have now is flawed. If we had a SSD that had the same size of our RAM, and computers where designed* to save the RAM on this SSD when you shutdown (or from time to time in case of power failure), and then just restored it on boot, it would be much better IMO.
* designed is very different from adapted (as suspend to disk is today)
mdmadph
03-25-2009, 01:36 PM
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.
Veerappan
03-25-2009, 01:45 PM
Oh, you were talking about suspend to disk.. Well, I only saw this working one time on my entire life, so I presumed nobody used it, sorry..
I think the very concept of boot we have now is flawed. If we had a SSD that had the same size of our RAM, and computers where designed* to save the RAM on this SSD when you shutdown (or from time to time in case of power failure), and then just restored it on boot, it would be much better IMO.
* designed is very different from adapted (as suspend to disk is today)
It takes a bit of work, but I have hibernate support working correctly on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000, Ubuntu 8.4, and now 8.10). It did take a bit of work, but eventually I convinced it to function. The only real downside to it, which prevents me from using it more often is that the hard drive in the machine is so slow to save the RAM to disk that it might actually be faster to shutdown/reboot than hibernate the machine.
Michael
03-25-2009, 02:33 PM
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
mdmadph
03-25-2009, 02:52 PM
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.
BlackStar
03-25-2009, 03:07 PM
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.
RealNC
03-25-2009, 03:11 PM
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.
Veerappan
03-25-2009, 03:30 PM
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.
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.
MaestroMaus
03-25-2009, 04:22 PM
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).
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.
clickwir
03-25-2009, 07:51 PM
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?
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.
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