Imagine an operating system that would boot in two seconds -- that’s what Intel is aiming for with Moblin.
We reported earlier this year that Intel had released a Linux-based operating system for alpha testing. Intel’s aim for Moblin is to provide the Atom CPU a light and fast OS that less stressful than running a full blown version of Windows.
Those who have been testing the alpha version since late January have found that parts of the system can be started up in just seconds. If Intel is able to reduce all initialization processes to just a couple seconds, and have them run in parallel, we could have the fastest booting OS yet.
Intel Open Source Technology Center director Imhad Sousou spoke at the Linux Collaboration Summit about reducing Moblin boot times, detailed in Ars Technica’s report. By cutting out bloat, parallelizing and other streamlining techniques, Sousou declared, "We think that two second boot is possible."
A reduced boot time would increase the usability of any system, but particularly so for portable devices such as the netbooks and MIDs that Moblin is targeted at. Often we’re finding that we prefer to have our notebooks (and netbooks) in and out of sleep states for the sake of having nearly-immediate access. Of course, sleep modes do drain battery as well as risk data loss, and hibernate modes still incur wait times as RAM is being written back and forth.
Would you be willing to try Moblin (that’s right, bye bye Windows, hello Linux) on your netbook if Intel made good on its promises for a two second boot time?
