One second Openmoko boot?

Jon 'maddog' Hall maddog at li.org
Wed Aug 19 22:01:29 CEST 2009


>Maybe this might be possible in some future of Openmoko Linux?

Yes and no.  Of course and not. :-)

Depends on what your definition of "cold boot" is.

There are trade-offs here, as always.  As I understand it, the read-only
text of the kernel was in ROM (could have been Flash), so did not have
to be read in off a file system and "loaded".  On the other hand they
were loading and initializing device drivers, and on a fixed system like
the Openmoko you probably could cut down on that process quite a bit.

Issues like memory bandwidth to the processor, processor speed, etc.
etc.

But the real question is, what was the customer need that drove the
work?

Probably a lot of engineering work went into that "one second boot", but
what would a "one second boot" (versus a two second or three second
boot) really gain the FreeRunner unless you had a "boot on incoming
event", and a way to capture that event until the phone had booted and
could handle it?

IMHO what would be more useful is even more power management work to
make the battery last longer in normal running mode, suspend and deep
suspend, rather than shortening the (hopefully) once per year boot
cycle.

Warmest regards,

md




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