Re: [ProgSoc] Fast booting

[Telford Tendys <telford@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

On Wed, May 20, 1998 at 09:47:15AM +1000, Vik wrote:
> Would it be feasible to create a program, which, when halting a Linux (or
> other) system, takes a snapshot of all memory (including virtual) being
> used, dumps this to disk, and then when the system is started again, just
> restores it memory contents instead of loading everything from scratch? Is

There are some conceptual problems with this. Firstly is the hardware...
OK, you can assume that no physical hardware has changed since the last boot
but the state of hardware might be random on power up so some init cycle
must bring it EXACTLY in line with the core image otherwise a crash is
quite likely.

Second problem is speed. If you have noticed that crashing a program that
is consuming 50M of space takes a long time to produce a core dump then
you probably have some idea of the time taken to reload this into the
system. It might be slightly faster than a normal boot but not vastly so.

Some Win95 laptops can swap their entire core to disc when they power down
and swap it back when they wake up. Obviously the program to do this is
patched into the OS somehow but at least it shows that it's possible.
When I saw it, I'd guess that it booted in about half the time of a normal
Win95 boot but that's about a typical Linux boot time anyhow...

	- Tel
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