Making a Fast Boot Faster

OK, so I’ve already been spoiled by the quick boot. My little Raspberry Pi/ RiscOS computer is not only the smallest in my collection now, it’s the one that boots most quickly. I get to the splash and progress bar in 10 seconds, to the desktop in 20, and onto the internet in 21 seconds, since Netsurf takes only one or two seconds to load (not including the fetch of the default site). The only other thing I have that’s even in the ballpark, boot-speed wise, is Haiku OS on an AMD.

So spoiled I am! But, I wanted more! So I switched to manual settings for the network, to get rid of the DHCP delay. This did not seem to help all that much. Anyway, what are the “tips from the experts” relative to making the boot even faster than it already is?

Make you own Boot. It’s risky and it will cause probably many compatibility problems, but I did that years ago on my RPC with great speed-up.
Boot procedure would really need a clean-up, and some configure things could be in ROM, as on RISC OS 3.1.

You can also make you own smaller ROM, and then save a few centiseconds for the loading of the file.
Last option is to help as a developer. RISC OS is not (so) much optimized for modern hardware.

My Pi Zero boots to the desktop in 11s, just by using a static IP address rather than DHCP.

I think unplugging BootFX knocks about a second off the boot time. This will get rid of the splash screen on boot, but won’t affect anything once the system is booted.

Just on a historical note, in the olden days we just had a Boot file of type Desktop which just executed a list of commands, then we moved on to the very simple Boot application which ran this file inside an app directory with icon sprites and Boot and Run files.

Then, as things became larger and more sophisticated/complicated and hard discs became more common, the forerunner of the Universal Boot application was devised with its automatic booting of resources and stuff like the eventual all-singing all-dancing Universal Boot itself.

If you were just dedicated to running one or two apps, most of it could actually be dispensed with!

But that would throw the future-proofing of the whole scheme out of the window. It’s horses for courses!

save a few centiseconds for the loading of the file

…or just admit that under 30s is pretty damn fast; and while messing with the boot, building your own ROMs, and so on may allow you to shave off a few centiseconds here and there to make it even faster…there surely comes a time when “fast enough” is indeed “fast enough” and any more work will take inordinately longer to implement and test (and debug if it later proves to have an adverse effect) then it ever would have saved.

We tend to notice things that start up slowly when their slowness is an impediment to their use. Examples:

The Sky Digibox takes forever to start. It did with the original Pace models, apparently it still does with the Sky+HD kit. My FTA boxes by contrast, about four seconds and eight seconds respectively.

The Livebox 1.2 (mini book style) took about four minutes. The Livebox 2 (squared off corner) is moderately quicker at three and a half minutes. Although in both cases it may take a further minute or two before the internal DNS server sorts itself out and returns meaningful results.¹ The temporary replacement (WAG200G running OpenWAG)? Boots in 19 seconds, just tested it. A few more for ADSL sync, then it’s ready to go.

My PC takes several minutes to boot Windows. My Pi takes several seconds to boot RISC OS. When I tried a couple of years ago, the Pi booted RISC OS in sixteen seconds. No bull, no tricks. Just booting the machine as per normal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idN0Cph1hh8

So – are you happy with being on the internet from power-up in twenty one seconds? If so, don’t risk breaking things just for a second or two less. These sorts of speeds are plenty fast enough, don’t you think?

¹ Since the stupid thing initially returns its own address to all DNS queries; ipconfig /flushdns is your friend…

So – are you happy with being on the internet
from power-up in twenty one seconds? If so, don’t
risk breaking things just for a second or two less.
These sorts of speeds are plenty fast enough,
don’t you think?

It’s as fast as I’ve ever had, on any system having both a GUI and internet connectivity. So, yes, it’s fast enough, especially if I’d have to lose functionality or stability to gain boot-speed. But, I thought I’d check for the low hanging fruit anyway. So far, no stability issues in a few days running.

During the past few days, I’ve found myself booting the RISCOS/Pi, just to “check the news” – It’s quick enough to do that, as opposed to my Linux/AMD or other boxes, which definitely are not fast enough for that. I leave the Linux box running when I know I’ll be making intermittant use if it.

Glad I decided to try the OS. Maybe it’s become my permanent news machine!