Advice Request Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8

[Jack]

Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8

When it comes to talking about "fundamentals" we want to start with boot time – no feature gets talked about and measured more. We designed Windows 8 so that you shouldn't have to boot all that often (and we are always going to work on reducing the number of required restarts due to patching running code). But when you do boot we want it to be as fast as possible. This is a very deep topic and we have a lot of folks focused on it. We made a bigger leap in this area with Windows 8 than we have in a long time due in no small part to cooperation across the whole ecosystem. Gabe Aul, a director of program management in Windows, authored this post (a first in what will be a series of posts on fundamentals).



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[win7holic]

RE: Building Windows 8 - Development stages

blaaazzingg fassst. i like it.

 

[Jack]

RE: Building Windows 8 - Development stages

blaaazzingg fassst. i like it.

Yes , it looks very impressive but they've most likely prepared that OS to load as fast as possible..no apps,no extra service and all that fun stuff... Don't really know if a standard computer will ever manage to boot in less than 10 seconds in real life.
Apparently this increase in the boot up speed is due to their new hybrid shutdown procedure that’s pretty similar to hibernation however on Windows 8 it won't save your open apps, instead it will just save the Windows 8 kernel session which the operating system would typically have to build from scratch.

Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).

It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well.

 

[jamescv7]

That's a big cut down boot up times, which is 3x fastest perhaps.

 

[Valentin N]

it also depends on amount of cores the cpu has and what GHz it's at, the hard drive, ram

 

[Deleted member 178]

it also depends on amount of cores the cpu has and what GHz it's at, the hard drive, ram

exactly fast boot OS with slow hardware components negate the benefit