2007-07-25, 20:32
Hi!
This is a call for brainstorming ideas!
I believe one of the most important WAF (women acceptance factor) is the boot-time (and my own acceptance factor in living room). This definitely was the MAIN reason why I prefered to take a proprietary MICROSOFT Xbox with XBMC over a notebook! I believe I can not overstress this fact!
My women would never accept a device in living room that takes more than 10 seconds to boot to show a short video for the kids. Otherwise only VCR and DVD-Player would be acceptable and comparable! (The latter is the right/real competition for measuring boot time!)
I never saw a PC with an "operating system" AND "application" boot so extremely fast like XBMC !
As Gamester17 says:
BUT: XBMC REALLY was READY to OPERATE after 10 seconds! I can start selecting menu entries, browse my LAN-drive, start a video after about 20 seconds at all!
How can we preserve this with XBMC on linux? Does anybody know? Did anybody try things like that? Can we reach "our" old XBMC boot time of 10 seconds with ubuntu (embedded)? What is about Apple TV?
Here a guy is talking of a 3 seconds boot time for linux single user mode with a special linux BIOS (linux kernel within BIOS):
http://www.epiacenter.de/modules.php?nam...er=&thold=
The rules of brainstorming usually interdict criticism! (But of course this is still a discussion board!) But many ideas shall encourage/inspire new and really good ones!
yuvalt says:
This maybe an easy solution! But my impression is: XBMC needs to reboot very often, e.g. when network connections tilt, coruppted media file occur, cancel button pressed, python scripts make trouble and so on.
But perhaps its still a good idea, because only XBMC needs reboot on top of the still and stable running linux (with any kind of special reset button?).
Another additional solution maybe: make XBMC more fault tolerant ...
More ideas? Anybody?
Has anybody tried to deactivate hwprobe and all unneeded HW and measured boot time?
Are there any other standard linux mechanisms that allow for fast operating mode and deferred boot remainder?
PS: If we get a special good solution for this, it might be a solution for many other operating systems at least linux distros as well.
This is a call for brainstorming ideas!
I believe one of the most important WAF (women acceptance factor) is the boot-time (and my own acceptance factor in living room). This definitely was the MAIN reason why I prefered to take a proprietary MICROSOFT Xbox with XBMC over a notebook! I believe I can not overstress this fact!
My women would never accept a device in living room that takes more than 10 seconds to boot to show a short video for the kids. Otherwise only VCR and DVD-Player would be acceptable and comparable! (The latter is the right/real competition for measuring boot time!)
I never saw a PC with an "operating system" AND "application" boot so extremely fast like XBMC !
As Gamester17 says:
Gamester17 Wrote:Remember that fast load and boot times only needs to be for end-user perception (other things can still run/start in the background without the user knowledge, ...like for Windows, only becuase you can move the mouse and browse the start-menu does not mean that Windows has finished booting).
BUT: XBMC REALLY was READY to OPERATE after 10 seconds! I can start selecting menu entries, browse my LAN-drive, start a video after about 20 seconds at all!
How can we preserve this with XBMC on linux? Does anybody know? Did anybody try things like that? Can we reach "our" old XBMC boot time of 10 seconds with ubuntu (embedded)? What is about Apple TV?
Here a guy is talking of a 3 seconds boot time for linux single user mode with a special linux BIOS (linux kernel within BIOS):
http://www.epiacenter.de/modules.php?nam...er=&thold=
The rules of brainstorming usually interdict criticism! (But of course this is still a discussion board!) But many ideas shall encourage/inspire new and really good ones!
yuvalt says:
yuvalt Wrote:What about standby (S3)? Should resume in 3 seconds or less..
Gamester17 Wrote:Major To-Do tasks with low priority
* [MAJOR - LOW PRIORITY] Hibernation - Suspend to Disk (STD) (code should be completly different from STR)
** Hibernation (Suspend to Disk), only if could somehow be used to speed up the initial boot-time.
* [MAJOR - LOW PRIORITY] Suspend and Resume support - Suspend to RAM (STR) (not to share code with STD)
This maybe an easy solution! But my impression is: XBMC needs to reboot very often, e.g. when network connections tilt, coruppted media file occur, cancel button pressed, python scripts make trouble and so on.
But perhaps its still a good idea, because only XBMC needs reboot on top of the still and stable running linux (with any kind of special reset button?).
Another additional solution maybe: make XBMC more fault tolerant ...
More ideas? Anybody?
Has anybody tried to deactivate hwprobe and all unneeded HW and measured boot time?
Are there any other standard linux mechanisms that allow for fast operating mode and deferred boot remainder?
PS: If we get a special good solution for this, it might be a solution for many other operating systems at least linux distros as well.