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Windows 8 to deliver faster boot times

by Navin Maini on 9 September 2011, 12:15

Tags: Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Windows 8

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Microsoft has commenced a series of blog posts on the fundamentals of its upcoming Windows 8 OS - beginning with the attention it's paying to delivering faster boot times.

The new solution to reducing boot times, represents a fusion of the traditional cold boot process, and resuming from hibernate. Currently, in a traditional shutdown, all user sessions and kernel sessions (services, devices e.t.c) are closed, resulting in a complete shutdown. With Windows 8, whilst all user sessions will be closed, the kernel session will be hibernated - and upon system boot - Microsoft claims that this will deliver an improvement of between 30 and 70 per cent in boot times.

 

 

Hibernating the kernel session lends a hand to ensuring that the system is doing less work than during a full system boot, and multi-phase resume capability means that all CPU cores - in a multi-core system - will work in parallel to read and decompress the contents of the hibernation file.

 

 

Users will still have the opportunity to revert back to a traditional shutdown/boot process, should they choose, and whilst we're told that the benefits of the initiative will be enjoyed by HDD-based systems, the company calls the experience with faster SSDs, 'downright amazing'.



HEXUS Forums :: 24 Comments

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Now that's a welcome improvement - the demo in their video they showed was shockingly quick.

/wishes he had UEFI :(
I don't see this as an important feature for two reasons:

(1) SSDs are making inroads and bring boot times sub 20s to Windows 7 as is. In a few years, SSD boot drives will be standard fare.

(2) Device drivers are stupid enough as it is today. Hibernation frequently causes problems with drivers on my machines where I end up cold booting to resolve the issue. I understand that when hibernation becomes part of the boot process, and microsoft validates the drivers properly, those issues may be mitigated. I also think though that it'll be a painful process for end users until drivers really are stable enough for this mode of operation.
The way I understood it, after reading the blog post, was that device drivers would still initialise as normal, it's the kernel that's hibernated. Have I misunderstood something?
Any news on a Beta version for us to test yet?
hansmuff
I don't see this as an important feature for two reasons:

(1) SSDs are making inroads and bring boot times sub 20s to Windows 7 as is. In a few years, SSD boot drives will be standard fare.
Sub 20s is one thing, but taking it down to the level in that video is something else. The slowest part of it was the POST process, this highlights just how badly the PC needs UEFI. POSTing a laptop is one thing, doing that with a desktop is going to show that the BIOS POST is going to be many times longer than the Windows 8 boot process. Anyway, that system was using a SSD to get to that level.

hansmuff
(2) Device drivers are stupid enough as it is today.
See below

pauldarkside
The way I understood it, after reading the blog post, was that device drivers would still initialise as normal, it's the kernel that's hibernated. Have I misunderstood something?
Directly from the article:

Sp yes, it's just the kernel session that goes into the hibernation, meaning drivers are still initialised just like in a cold boot and so is the user session. You will still need a full boot at times, after a Windows Update that affects the kernel for example, or for anti virus app updates.