Instant ON OS - Discussion Reloaded

@thebigk • Oct 26, 2024

Oct 26, 2024

1.7K

We had few posts here: #-Link-Snipped-#

Reigniting the discussion through this thread. I'm hoping to see lot of great responses.

An instant ON operating system, as the name suggests, would turn on instantly at a press of a button.

Why don't we still have instant on operating system after so many decades of invention of operating systems?

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arun.aj

@arunaj-OPUrll • Oct 9, 2009

os ..! is a heavy weight process..
guess tats one of the primary reasons..
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Ashraf HZ

@Ash • Oct 9, 2009

This is for microelectronic engineers to answer as well. The bottleneck still lies in hardware, more specifically the non volatile storage memory 😀 As much as software engineers can cut in loading times, they are still limited on how fast they can access data from memory given a certain hardware cost.

I suppose perceived "instant" on would be 1 second. Certainly possible if MRAMs goes mainstream. If we assume the read time of 1us for each bit, and assuming CPU pipelines and bandwidths are just as fast, you can load 1000000000 bits in a second.. or nearly 120 MB of OS.

If you want to load a lite Linux OS, with MRAMs, you can boot up the OS within the human reaction time of 100 ms.
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Aashish Joshi

@aashish-VrevFC • Oct 9, 2009

I liked one idea by mahul:

I was trying to propose a fixed, non-customizable OS on a flash ROM with a limited number of applications that people normally use just after they boot up.

For example, you could have a file browser process, a music player, and a document editor permanently on the flash ROM. These processes will be available the instant the machine is powered up. During this time, the normal boot up continues in the RAM. Once it is complete, it takes over and CPU starts accessing addresses from the RAM.
This is doable i think. Embed the basic stuff on a chip so that certain basic services are available instantly (read in a second or two) and the rest of the stuff is loaded gradually.

Of course, the drawback could be that you would have to wait to use any of the other services, which was the thing we were trying to avoid in the first place!! 😁

One possible solution could be customizing the applications a user needs once the OS starts. this could be limited to, say x programs. The user could use something similar to the BIOS flashing utilities to change the programs that are available upon (instant) boot.
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sookie

@sookie-T06sFW • Oct 10, 2009

[SPAM]

The_Big_K
Why don't we still have instant on operating system after so many decades of invention of operating systems?
May be all OS developers are still busy in developing the next versions release of their already existing OS which are definitely not incorporating instant OS features. 😛

[/SPAM]
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