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Showing posts from November, 2008

Splashtop: Solving slow boot problems

Recently someone sent me a link to splashtop , in context of some work I was doing on Asus Eeepc. Splashtop is a OEM installed OS that boots off a embedded flash/hidden-partition device on your PC. It uses Bootsplash , SquashFS , Blackbox , SCIM and Linux kernel . Splashtop's raison d'etre is to provide instant-on/off experience to PC. Since PC boot times are slow, most people don't even turn off their machines. Splashtop takes about a second to show it's splashscreen right after BIOS on a Asus notebook. From this screen, you can launch virtual appliance'cified Firefox or Skype or boot Windows etc. One thing to note is that each of these operations in turn may take 5 to 25 seconds. I wonder if this is a feasible approach to solve this problem. Boot process which involves hardware initialization, OS initializtion, startup application initialization - all of these operations have to take "some" amount time. And we know that most of these are IO bound due to