For some reason we all love a machine that can boot quickly – even though it is slowly becoming more and more irrelevant because machines can actually sleep and hibernate quite reliably (and quickly) these days. But still – it is great to fire up a machine and see how quickly it can get us to the desktop. Right?
Problem is that boot time are reliant on quite a few factors, hard drive speed and number of drivers loading being the most important. Sure, things like SSD can really have amazing effects on boot time, but Microsoft wants to cut down on this boot time in Windows 8 even more. Microsoft is proposing a “fast startup mode” which takes elements from a standard boot combined with the hibernate function.
Most impressive is the machines which actually have very long boot times will benefit the most – 70 seconds being cut down to 20 seconds is pretty amazing. So how is Microsoft going about this?
Without getting too technical – the biggest change is that the kernel session will be stored in hibernation file. The kernel is rather small compared to a standard hibernate restore, so it is a lot faster than restoring from hibernate which requires the entire memory contents to be read from the hard drive back to the RAM. The speed improvement comes from the fact that drivers do not have to be reinitialized from scratch, as the kernel is read in an active state already. This excludes device drivers however – so plug and play devices will continue to be recognized. The other big speed improvement comes from the fact that the boot process will now use multicore processors much more effectively. While the kernel hibernation file is read, a second thread kicks off to decompress the bit that has been read already. This will improve standard hibernation processes as well.
The results are very impressive. Check out this video – which is done on a bog standard HP Elitebook 2560p notebook with an SSD. Looks like the slowest part is the POST part which is not really in Microsoft’s control…
It is clear that Microsoft is taking some cues from the public’s shift towards devices like smartphones and tablets which have instant on capabilities. Many have been dismissing Windows in recent times comapred to instant on devices like the Macbook Air which lasts up to 30 days in sleep mode. The problem is that people still use standard shut downs / reboots because they believe it is safer and more reliable. Microsoft currently points out that about half of all machines are shut down instead of being put into sleep mode. This is down to people not trusting sleep mode, because it keeps on draining the battery – Microsoft has to push hardware providers to improve on this, then the speed of reboot will become irrelevant.
If you want more technical detail on how Microsoft does this, check out the Windows 8 Build blog.