Comment by cperciva
3 years ago
Not all code is slow. I can now boot a FreeBSD kernel in under 20 ms, which I'm pretty sure beats a 20 year old FreeBSD (not to mention a 20 year old Windows).
3 years ago
Not all code is slow. I can now boot a FreeBSD kernel in under 20 ms, which I'm pretty sure beats a 20 year old FreeBSD (not to mention a 20 year old Windows).
Is this on real hardware? And does “boot” mean to a login prompt?
I ask because I’ve never had a computer (no matter how fast) boot in less than 10 seconds on Windows or Linux. Just getting to the boot loader takes a good 3 seconds or more. If I have to FreeBSD to get a fast boot, I’ll do it! (On an old laptop, at least).
That's in Firecracker, time it takes to boot the kernel aka before we start running init.
Including userland -- i.e. "boot to login prompt" -- it's around 450 ms on the same VM; I haven't optimized the userland bits all that much yet.
Real hardware will take longer and will vary of course; we can't do anything about the time between poweron and when the boot loader starts running, for example.