14 DAY TRIAL // A Chinese developer has managed to build a system, based on AllWinner A10, that is capable of booting in under a second.
The boot time of a system has become very important, and every developer strives to reduce it as much as possible.
A Chinese developer, threewater, has shown that it is possible to boot a simple Linux system in less than a second, as spotted by cnx-software.com.
The hardware used is pretty basic: Allwinner A10 @ 1GHz, DDR3 RAM 512MB, and NAND Flash 4GB.
The software is a different story: nand boot with yuq uboot mtd, a modified Lnux-sunxi 3.4 kernel, squashfs, and QT 4.7.4(.ttf font for Chinese).
The results are impressive. If the system boots without the Qt interface (speed dials), the total time is 0.85 seconds. With the Qt dials, the time goes up to 1.2 seconds.
The boot log:
[1.770000 1.770000] U-Boot SPL 2013.01-g8a69ff9-dirty (Apr 22 2013 - 13:05:36) [0.007000 0.007000] Board: EM6000 [0.009000 0.002000] DRAM: 512MB [0.810000 0.801000] /etc/init.d/rcS: line 6: /data/run.sh: not found [0.835000 0.025000] [0.843000 0.008000] login[42]: root login on 'ttyS0' [0.851000 0.008000] [root@(none) /root]#