Linux Boots Up In 2.97 Seconds

Japanese embedded Linux house Lineo has announced a quick-start technology that it claims can boot Linux in 2.97 seconds on a low-powered system. The technology appears similar to but much faster than Linux's existing "suspend-to-disk" capability.



Warp 2 comprises a bootloader, Linux kernel, and a "hibernation driver," says the company. The driver takes a snapshot of RAM when hibernation is launched, saving the contents into flash memory, optionally compressing the data. On start-up, the contents are quickly returned to RAM, so that the system resumes its previous running state.

In addition, Warp 2 is touted for its ability to support multiple snapshots, presumably to allow booting to either a pristine or resumed state.

Warp 2 boasts a smaller memory size for hibernated data, compared to the original version, Lineo said. The improved snapshot compression can squeeze the image filesize to about half, depending on the contents of RAM. In one Lineo demo, for example, RAM image size was reduced from 32MB to 19MB, it said.

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