Was looking to boot to Qt under a couple of seconds for a camera use case a few months back, and came across similar demos. Can work well for very specific applications/products.
Here's a video of a talk by the author of this particular pdf
That’s super impressive! I have spent many hours optimizing embedded boot times, but it’s amazing how much faster it can be when the hardware is virtualized!
Congrats jeremy, looks fantastic! That video showing the miniscule boot time brings me hope that it is possible to write software that takes advantage of the crazy-fast computers we have these days.
What's the time spent on bootup? Hardware POST? I remember seeing some Linux can boot in under a second. It would be cool to see the business card come to life instantly.
If you make your own buildroot image, you can get VERY quick boot times - here's a random vid I found [1] with 3.5 seconds on a pi zero w (which is considerably less powerful than a Pi3.
I've worked with similarly underpowered boards (licheepi zero, only has 64mb ram and uses the cpu from a dashcam!) and those will still boot and start an SDL app in under five seconds.
If you can identify the bare minimum that you need for your EQ solution, you can probably get similar boot times.
I used to achieve 1-2 second boot times by just reconfiguring my kernel to only load drivers for hardware I actually had installed. It's more like 4-5 seconds now that ASLR is a thing, but I'm not complaining.
I couldn't get to the site, but assuming this is running Linux I wrote a paper about how fast you could boot a Linux minimal userspace on QEMU a couple of years ago[1]. In short if you're willing to heavily customize the kernel, qemu and userspace then you can get it down to 100-150ms on i7-type hardware, but probably not much lower. Using a distro kernel, distro qemu and so on, you're stuck with 400-600ms (which is fine for certain uses, eg better security for containers like Kata Containers is doing).
Also worth noting I wrote a bunch of benchmarking tools to help optimize this case[2].
Here's a video of a talk by the author of this particular pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTRA1PRJWH8
Will be interesting to see what impact Intel's 3D Xpoint will have on boot times too.
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