LinuxJournal has published a three-part article series discussing approaches to speeding up Linux boot time for use in automotive telematics systems, which are increasingly becoming a target application for embedded Linux.

In the first part, author Damien Stolarz observes, “The late John Muir took a philosophical approach to waiting for slow starts in his 1969 book How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, where he recommended rolling a cigarette and getting a good toke going, by which time the car will be warmed up and ready to drive. However, as smoking anything but cannabis has been all but outlawed (in California at least), the only solution that remains for car PCs is to reduce boot times.”

From there, Stolarz goes on to discuss boot time reduction strategies such as using faster hardware, a smaller kernel, parallelizing boot tasks, staged boots, booting from a “canned” memory and system state, replacing the BIOS with the OS itself, and never shutting down.

In the third part, Stolarz outlines the steps his company took to create a Linux system that boots in just under 20 seconds, including under seven seconds of actual Linux booting time. Stolarz notes that this result remains significantly short of the goal of a five second system boot time.

The articles are here:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

 
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