Booting Linux In Just One Second

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 23 November 2015 at 09:27 AM EST. 37 Comments
HARDWARE
One of the most interesting presentations from this year's Embedded Linux Conference Europe was how-to boot Linux in under one second!

For targeting various embedded use-cases, Jan Altenberg of Linutronix presented how to achieve this feat of booting Linux in under one second.

Booting Linux in one second can be useful for automotive applications -- among other scenarios -- greater energy savings rather than dealing with suspending the system, and more. Some of the work done by Linutronix -- a German company focused on Linux for industrial use-cases -- included optimizations to the U-Boot boot-loader, using LZO kernel image compression, various kernel command-line tweaks, kernel configuration changes, using UbiFS, and more.

Using an Atmel AT91 ARM9 SoC with Angstrom Linux and NAND flash storage, the stock boot time began at 11 seconds but with simple optimizations dropped to 8 seconds and then with the extensive modifications in time dropped to around 656 ms.

More details can be found via the PDF slides and the video presentation from Embedded Linux Conference Dublin that's embedded below.

Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week