Windows 8 to boot in 8 seconds
Save our kernel sessions
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
Microsoft is touting very fast boot times for Windows 8, thanks to the clever trick of writing the kernel state to disk at shutdown.
Rather than write the whole contents of memory to Windows' hibernation file, Windows 8 just writes enough to be able to put the state of driver, services and such back into memory, ready to run, at start-up. The kernel session is put into hibernation.
The kernel session file is compressed and saved. At start-up, it is de-compressed, a process that has been heavily parallelised to take advantage of multi-core CPUs for start-up speed.
The upshot: booting takes 30-70 per cent less time - up to just a eight seconds in a demo vid - with Windows 8.
Caveats apply, of course. While Microsoft says this tech speeds up booting off an HDD, it'll be faster still with an SSD, and expect it to use solid-state storage in video demos like the one over at the MSDN blog.
The blog also details how it's all achieved, and is worth a read.
And Microsoft cautions that to get best results your machine needs UEFI firmware rather than Bios. That's not because UEFI is inherently faster, but that, being newer, code written for it tends to be optimised more efficiently than old Bios code.
Finally, getting the user to log in, and then loading up post-login apps, data and services, will be no quicker.
Windows 8 will retain the - optional - ability to perform a full cold boot, loading and initialising the drivers and services from storage. ®
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COMMENTS
Tea time
I prefer the 'press power button, put kettle on, make tea, sit down to machine' approach.
None of this 'instant' malarkey -- won't somebody think of the workers?
you guys are funny
It sounds like some of you would be much, much happier if Windows 8 took longer to boot.
At least then you'd have some valid reasons for criticisms rather than this usual tripe..
If they add features it's anti-trust baiting bloatware
If they take them away then it's a rip off
If they have different versions then it's "confusing"
If they don't have different versions, then it's a rip off paying for unused features..
It's too different from the previous version
It's too similar to the previous version
This doesn't just go for Microsoft, but in general critics don't mind if other critics have entirely contradictory reasons for complaining... so long as they're complaining.
Yes it remains to be seen (which makes the whole business of prejudgements silly), however it seems apparent they even if they announce features that would be welcomed on any other system, some will find a reason to complain.
And complain, not that it'll be bad, but shock horror, it might be good, possibly successful and pervasive OS on everything from desktops to tablets. That would be awful, if M$ ever bring out a decent O/S you guys will have to find something else to bitch about.
Your mum's cooking perhaps?
Title goes here
Thats nothing, my ZX81 used to boot up even faster than Linux...
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