There's no question it would be impressive...but the point is that it would be completely useless. Considering the waste of development resources to implement...it wouldn't even be useless; rather it would be completely counter-productive and set the platform behind.

You want the impression of fast boot? Uncomment the sections in /etc/systemui/systemui.xml and choose the "Soft poweroff" option. Thanks to G.Antilles for the tip, even if he is a sanctimonious prick.

Thanks! I'm hopefully meeting TK for supper tonight.

The LWN article is a little sparse on details, but on this subject it says "The kernel has to be built without initrd, which takes half a second with nothing in it. So all modules required for boot must be built into the kernel" (emphasis mine).

It looks like we're already there on the "required for boot" front, and we now know that initfs is going away in Fremantle (probably for other more important reasons, but if it happens to improve boot speed at the same time no one's going to complain - same goes for upstart).

More importantly, the current kernel on current hardware takes less than 2" to boot (before initfs kicks in) so there seems to be little point in spending any effort specifically to optimise it further.

Agree 100%.

If anyone cares enough to try it may still be useful to see bootchart output to identify any obvious userland bottlenecks though.

I think I saw some bootcharts recently in these fora, actually... I don't recall what the point was, nor what thread.

Ah, maybe this was it: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...087#post223087

Regarding deblet, not Maemo, so not necessarily enlightening.

Hm, on second thought, will HSPA-capable devices require a power cycle to change the SIM? (I don't necessarily expect an answer, but it's something to consider.)

Hopefully not, but AFAIK all current Nokia devices with a SIM slot do. If so, boot time and power consumption during boot/user session startup suddenly become much more important.

This is one of a very few areas where Nokia should take hints from Apple IMHO.

Um, you're planing on swapping your SIM card more than once a day? :\

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/jvtmuukk/chinook/bootchart/ has ones for chinook.

It IS generic. See https://bugs.maemo.org/page.cgi?id=bug-writing.html , especially "Be specific. The quicker the engineers can isolate the bug to a specific area, the more likely they'll fix it."
Feel free to propose explicit technical changes.

..and Apple has to add removable battery. Besides that, Apple has SIM lock, and sell it like that as well.

We need to keep in mind the reasons one would want to (or must) reboot.

1) User adds/removes physical hardware not supporting hotswap
2) User wishes to reboot to new kernel
3) User puts the device off because it won't be used for quite a while
4) User starts it up because it has crashed
5) User starts it up because it was previously out of power
6) User used suspend or hibernate and this went broken

Case 1 happens far more often on a desktop or cheap server than in quality servers, laptops, embedded devices (including NIT), and such.

Case 2 happens far less on an embedded device as the NIT than on a laptop or nettop. It only happens when a security or reliabability patch has been added. For NIT, it basically only happens during SSU, and then its expected (right? at least from my point of view it is).

Case 3 happens during travelling; planned usage.

Case 4 shouldn't occur, it destroys user's trust/reliability for/on device...

Case 5 occurs quite often. More often than on a desktop or server, but perhaps more on par with a laptop or nettop?

Case 6 isn't supported well on the NIT while it is good supported on laptops and nettops.

If you add it all up, + and -, there is a slight less importance for fast booting on a NIT than on other devices, except in rare cases.

But let me say this. 33 seconds is acceptable to me. 33 seconds is acceptable waiting for my DVR to boot. 15 seconds is acceptable for my TV. 10 seconds is OK for my radio. For my NIT, 1 minute isn't acceptable. That is the point. I don't like to wait for my laptop to boot a minute either. That too is Intel market, but not Nokia market. And, 10 minutes for GPS (or more, or days...)? No that isn't acceptable at all.

So while 33 sec is acceptable, 25 seconds is even better, and 15 too. It isn't a deal-breaker for most people, but its very nice if it boots quicker. That is why on 3rd page Texrat message makes most sense: try to make the device faster, but don't make it some kind of goal to make it 5 seconds. That is undoable. And, learn from others who are aiming at this.

Not on most days, but I do tend to travel a lot and EU roaming charges are still not low enough.

Maybe I'm a bit spoiled, but right now I can take the tablet to the airport, browse/check email/etc while waiting to board, play 2-3 hours' worth of music and/or video to alleviate flight boredom and still have enough juice left after I land to check email and fire up the GPS to find my hotel/meeting/whatever (and a power socket).

Rebooting eats around 10% of my battery charge once metacrawler etc have settled, so I'd rather not have to do it :-/