Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

What's The Fastest Loading OS For x86? 37

Posted by Cliff from the on-your-marks-get-set-BOOT! dept.
core10k asks: "I have a question concerning quick loading operating systems. I have a laptop that I use which I'd *like* to have running in the 10 seconds or so it takes for the BIOS to heat up, but then I have to wait for Windows 98 to load. And I know that Linux is even slower loading up. So I was wondering, does anyone know of a fast-loading operating system that has a half-decent (not necessarily great) C/C++ and GUI toolkit?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

What's the Fastest Loading OS for x86? More

What's the Fastest Loading OS for x86?

Comments Filter:

  • Re:Suspend to disk (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You may need to set it up first, the laptop's manual should explain it. But you'll probably need a FAT partition (as the first partition on your drive) to store the file. And the file will be the same size as your RAM (i.e. a 64MB file for 64MB RAM). When you turn your laptop on, this file will be read into RAM by the BIOS. It takes 10-20 seconds. Try turning off the power to your laptop and see what happens. On mine (a Compaq), pressing the power switch (instead of shutting down) suspends to disk automatically.

  • Windows faster??? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't agree that windows is faster to boot than Linux at all. This is true when you are talking about a brand spanking new win95 installation and only considering 'time to GUI'. This isn't the whole picture however... As any Linux user will tell you when you see the X login prompt the OS is finished loading, likewise when you login your window manager starts and away you go. IMHO Windows 'pretends' to load when this isn't the case. I use NT in the office (smb server by my illegal linux box :) ) and I can promise you that when the NT login prompt appears on my screen (Which, incidently takes about four times as long as the X prompt) there is no way on earth that I can actually login for at least another minute as the hdd churns away. Likewise once I have logged in the windows GUI appears but I can't actually do anything until the hdd stops doing 'stuff'. Add to this the fact that trying to do things ONCE THE GUI IS UP but BEFORE THE HDD HAS STOPPED can crash the system this becomes another clear case of 'The winner in... Linux.'. Dan
  • My TP360 has the ability to suspend to RAM, essentially just stops spinning the hard disk and puts the processor in a low power mode. Yea, this means it still draws power, but hardly any at all. It can last several days (never really tested how long) on a single battery with no problem. Suspend time is only 10-15 seconds and resume is the same amount of time. Some laptops consider this standby mode, but I think in my case it is a bit closer to suspend. And it works from Linux! :)

    My two cents.
    ------------------------------------------ ----------------------------------

  • Posted by 11223:

    BeOS is indeed nice, but a minimum version of the linux system is even faster - the main bottleneck being time to mount the ext2 partition. ReiserFS mounts much faster, so Linux with ReiserFS booting into 'linux single' is the fastest I can think of. BeOS is the fastest booting complete environment.
  • Who said you have to wait for everything to load before starting a shell? why not modify the inittab and rc scripts and whatnot to run a shell on the first VC as soon as all the manditory services and drivers are load, things like SCSI, /usr, etc. Sure, the first minute or two ill be slow while you load sendmail and apache and all the rest of the stuff manditory for a personal computer, but you will have a shell. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to do that same with X, for nice GUI in the first few seconds.

    Alexander Beyn
  • There must be something wrong. I timed my Windows 2000 boot last night. It was about 65 seconds to boot on my P2-300 with 64MB/ram. I timed from the moment the video card initialized until I had a login screen and the disk stopped going crazy.
  • It might be worth your while to go to ftp.lineo.com/pub/drdos [lineo.com] and try a copy of their fine product. It does it's own "DOS Extend"ing, and can task-switch or multitask (although the implementation isn't as smooth as, say, Linux). It's much cooler than MS-DOS in many respects. If I had to use DOS, I'd pick up a license for it in a heartbeat. Of course, you don't need a license to "evaluate" it for 90 days, if I remember correctly.
  • I was able to load BEOS on an AMD K5 32mb.
    ...
    Only problem was Beos didn't support the K-5 so it would run until I started a program then...KABOOM!
  • Rather than speed up the OS loading, get rid of DOS BIOS and save yourself time that way!

    The Linux BIOS Project [lanl.gov] was in this [slashdot.org] /. article just a week ago. It's not ready for prime time yet, but does all the BIOS step in about 0.1 seconds! Combine this with the right Linux distribution (debian has a fast (binary) service startup program - do others?), and a carful choice of which services you run, and Linux would boot REALLY fast! :)

  • Of course you can't run the newest programs (or graphical programs). Or support more than 2GB drives (unless you have lots of partitions).

    And is vunerable to many virii.

    But it does boot fast.

  • okay, i just timed it down to the second. Windows 2000 took 2 min and 14.5 seconds to boot from video card init to login prompt.

    Linux took 1 min and 22.7 seconds from init to prompt.
    I really don't know why windows takes so long to load.. oh well, since i'm in linux most (99.9%) of the time anyways, its not too much of a problem. but i do wonder why.. i may look under the hood and tweak it a bit. ;-}
  • I don't know about linux taking longer then windows. Usually it takes less then a miniute and a half for my computer to go through the bios, pause for 5 seconds while lilo gives a chance to choose windows or linux, then load the kernel, modules, start services, etc. to a login prompt (Redhat 6.2).

    It's much faster then the 5 mins it takes for windows (2000 Professional)

    I have an AMD k6-2 350 with 64M RAM. not bad, IMHO.

  • BeOS (Score:1)

    by kescom ( 45565 )
    I've been amazed by it's speed. 9 seconds to boot, another three to mount both my other drives with FAT32 [REALLY FAT32 ;-)] filesystems. And app development is a dream - an entirely C++ oriented framework, of the app/view/data variety.

    And it's free. www.be.com
    [easy way to get around windows partition - drop me an email, ben@kescom.net, if you want help]
    Benjamin Stiglitz
    KEScom Hosting
  • While this really isn't a solution to your problem, Linux is definitely not slower loading than Windows. If you were to run the same functionality (daemons and such) on Linux as a basic Windows machine, Linux loads MUCH faster. Even with a bunch of daemons set to load, Linux loads as fast as a Windows machine that's not doing anything networking.

    Chris Hagar
  • QNX is closed-source, and mainly aimed at real-time tasks. I tested the boot disk too. It includes a nice small graphics demo. I managed to get fifteen instances of the demo running at once, but starting up one more just caused the system to freeze. I had to reboot, and never tried QNX again.. :)
    By the way, I saw the full version of QNX 4.54 pass by in alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc.os a few months ago. Probably some people are just collecting OS'es..
  • like do you really need sendmail running in the background of you personal box

    A lot of people do need sendmail (or, rather, an SMTP daemon of some sort) running, for fetchmail (and/or getting mail directly to your machine).

  • QNX is supposed to be giving away the full version for non-commercial use. But so far seems to be a lot more hype than anything else. The offer started months ago at http://get.qnx.com but so far they've yet to release it.
  • Its nice to see someone else acknowledge this, the disk really does go crazy in Windows NT 2000, when it initializes the hd during the startup splash screen, I fear that the hard drive is going to fail it thrashes so much, and during login too.
    I don't see how the Microsoft crowd can say this beast of an OS is faster than its 9x brothers. And this is on a 466 with 96mb ram too.

  • Re:BeOS (Score:1)

    by mmp ( 121767 )
    ext2 will mount much more quickly if you mount it with the "nocheck" flag in /etc/fstab. This disables a number of consistency checks at mount time that generally aren't worth the time. I believe that nocheck is the default, as of 2.4 kernels for sure, and possibly for newer 2.4 kernels. Nevertheless, I still like ReiserFS better for plenty of other reasons.
  • True, but you can make it start from inetd, so that instead of running all the time, it will only start when an incoming connection on port 21 occurs.

  • how would you go about setting that up???????
  • 5 minutes to boot win2000 *IS* bad. I haven't timed it, but I *KNOW* it didn't take 5 minutes on my supervisor's P233 with 64 megs. What else have you got loading on that thing?

  • When we installed Linux (Red Hat 5.2 deluxe) for class in college, we clicked "Everything" for services to start at boot-time, and the boot-time wasn't noticeably longer than Win95 (although it wasn't booting to X.)

    So if you turn off most everything (sendmail, named, finger, etc.), it should boot pretty quickly, and be a lot more secure.


    -- LoonXTall
  • LOL! Now let's see a development environment on it.

    WinCE still sucks pretty bad. I test devices running CE, and it has plenty of memory leaks here and there. And you know how well a typical piece of M$ software handles out of memory conditions... hehe
  • I read this, and it sounds like a dream come true, but A) I didn't/don't know enough about BIOS in general and the BIOS in my computer in particular to say if this is the solution for me. B) It's not done yet!

  • Suspend to disk (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Suspending to disk would solve this problem, if you're laptop supports it. Most newer laptops do.

  • QNX? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I received a 1.44 mb floppy from a friend labeled "qnx realtime operating system demo (modem version)". He said it was bootable on x86 and I was curious, so I decided to give it a go.

    It turned out to contain a contain an OS complete with windowing system and internet browser. Admittedly it didn't work first time, and I had to modify a couple of BIOS settings that it didn't like, but I was really impressed once I got it going. The windowing system took about twenty seconds to appear from the time the BIOS started the floppy going. It created a file system in RAM, and I was able to dial an ISP and surf. Some forms didn't work, and Java support is dubious, but you can't expect that much from something packed onto a 1.44 mb floppy.

    The website [qnx.com] has a boot floppy image which you can download. The latest version claims to allow additional driver and application installion via the network. Apparently they are downloaded (into the ram disk? - I'm not sure about hard disk support at this stage) and installed on the fly.

    This OS looks cool, and would totally rock with a hard disk , as it would boot in about four seconds. I suppose having a hard disk would lead to complicated boot routines that loaded permenantly stored drivers and other processes though, so that argument might not hold up . . . .

    Ok Ok, it would suck for many applications, and is mainly targeted at developers at this stage , but all you hard core "thin client, server based" computing enthusiasts should check it out if you haven't already heard of it.
  • We have a 386sx running linux 8mb (not booting to x) that boots faster than my AMD Athlon 500 128 MB scsi machine. It all depends on what you intend to run on it and the number of things to boot up.

    Check out an old version of slackware or maybe debian. RedHat is great and all but if you are looking for boot time rather than ease of configurability, etc. then it is terrible.

    Also thought I would mention that it is an install of less than 100 MB, try doing that easily in RedHat.

    Believe it: http://i386.sapien.net [sapien.net] (if it is down it is usually because of the NE2000 network card ((newest piece of hardware in the machine)))

  • Recently, I've built some linux boxes that (re)boot very quickly. The main thing I've done is remove unneeded crap from the booup, like do you really need sendmail running in the background of you personal box, I've been fine without it for months now (maybe I'm missing the zen of linux/unix without it but I'm happy). I've also made some things more parallel. eg: gpm (console mouse util) I don't need it first thing at boot so I have some scripts that delay it's loading or at least don't make it stop other things from loading at the same time.

    Get to know your linux box. Mainstream distros are geared for everybody and do a lota stuff you probably don't give a damn about.

    One other thing. Really large hard drives take forever to mount. look around there are ways to speed this up like reducing redundant fs checking (may not be a smart thing to do)
    Citrix

  • I've used this demo disk myself and was very impressed with what they got onto a floppy. I've downloaded some of the additional programs they mention - I think one of them is basically a shell, which was useful.

    One drawback to the demo disk is the fact that every time you boot you have to re-enter your ISP settings if you plan to try to surf. I think the license explicitly prohibits tinkering with the disk image in order to hard-code those values; I guess that's one reason they call it a "demo disk"!

    I don't know if the license prohibits copying the disk image to the start of a bootable partition of a hard disk. I'm not sure this would even work because I believe the OS on the demo disk doesn't have hard-drive support.

    I think you could get lots farther with Linux/BSD where you have unlimited ability to modify things.

  • BeOS (Score:2)

    by Mondo54 ( 48155 )
    BeOS...10 seconds or less on my 450 mhz 192 MB boxen.

  • QNX (Score:2)

    by technos ( 73414 )
    Free for personal use, and all the way up in under twenty seconds(power switch to finish). I'm using it as a 'instant boot' client on a couple of 486-33/24M laptops I had lying around..

    Very, very nice..

    BeOS is also quite quick. I'd expect it to come in under thirty on decent last gen hardware.

    Linux can also work, if you like a *nix style client. I've had P54D (166 Pentium) machines from post to login in under twenty. I was only starting a bare minimum of 'services' (inetd, routing, ethernet, card services) and running a very lean 2.0.xx kernel. The 1.2.xx series are even quicker, but may not have some of the device support you need..

  • Loads at bus speed. (not available on all platforms unfortunately)

    --
    Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess

  • Dos can do 32-bit through the use of what's commonly known as a "Dos Extender". Remember Doom and Quake and all those great games from the Dos era ? Ever noticed that "DOS4GW Protected Mode" startup message ?

    That's the Dos Extender being loaded. Basically it's a (relatively) small loader/overlay that switches into protected mode and handles the boring chore of thunking and relaying interrupts and all that delightfully mind numbing crap.

    DOS4GW was generally associated with Watcom C++, while DJGPP commonly uses GO32 as its extender although they are easily interchangeable with a few code changes (slightly different API's). Whichever extended you use, they do more or less the same things : thunking interrupts, managing flat ram (vs 16-bit segmented ram), and giving nice detailed register dumps when they crash.
  • As said in the subject, this also involves the program loaded in your boot sequence. I have used many OSses in my life and here are some of them, ordered by boot time :
    1. Palm OS (not x86)
    2. Psion Epoc (not x86)
    3. Acorn RiscOS (not x86)
    4. MS-DOS
    5. QNX
    6. BeOS 4
    7. AtheOS [atheos.cx]
    8. standalone Linux (with a few services up and without starting X)
    9. Windows 9x
    10. Windows NT
    11. NeXTstep (x86)
    IMHO having GCC or not should not make the boot longer.

    Concerning your need (C++ and GUI) I'd suggest BeOS or AtheOS. The problem with the latter being the lack of community. Tschüss!
    --

  • BeOS, BIOS, DOS, and DJGPP. (Score:3)

    by percival ( 97709 ) on Wednesday June 21, 2000 @11:18PM (#984587)

    Well, BeOS is fast, that's for sure. You might also want to look at the Linux BIOS page [lanl.gov] - it promises VERY fast linux loading... when the work is done.

    If all you want is a GUI of some type, DOS + Win 3.1 will load very fast, if you arrange it nicely. There's a DOS version of the GNU compiler environment here [delorie.com], so you can do C/C++ development under DOS, but I don't know about a GUI IDE. I recall there are several text IDEs.

    DOS won't take up too much space, either, so you might be able to keep Win98 on there for other boot times.

Slashdot Top Deals

I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.

Close