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370

Dell: Dude! You're getting Dell Instant On OS!

370 points posted to Operating Systems by jorge 11/06/07

This is the next step Dell, get on the bandwagon now!

Elaboration: Dell use or create your own Instant-On-OS, much like or just like Phoenix Technology's HyperSpace or SplashTop! You can make the decision but get one of those on board now!

More Elaboration: its for any OS so no matter which fence you sit on you'll get faster boot times! How can you beat that!

End Elaboration----Instant On OS

This is not only the fastest to boot OS but will also make you green, environmentally and financially! On top of that you can also include the bloated Microsoft OS on a hard drive (soon to be phased out, the hard drive that is, before you MS fans get tweeked).

So add this to all your motherboards as an option when configuring a system to order, also leave the hooks in there so anyone who's shortsighted now can still add it later, at a cost of course.



More stuff! Make the Instant OS to allow writing to a hard drive, usb flash memory or usb/firewire attached drive! Also, with the ability to update it and customize it to the users apps. Without these two add-ons its just a waste of resources. So this idea will only apply if its allows for writing to media (all) and being able to update it.

aikiwolfie
11/06/07		 Care to elaborate a bit more? Where does the diagram come from? Which instant on OS are we talking about? Should Dell write their own? Use Linux like ASUS? Details. I can't vote without details.
jorge
11/06/07		 Ok updated the idea, check out the links in the elaboration.
jorge
11/06/07		 Here's another Ref from withing the Ref:
<h>

http://svextra.com/blogs/gmsv/2007/11/we_were_going_to_call_it_swift_boot_but...
sugarbear
11/06/07		 This is a good idea for Linux or windows. Even if you take a lot of things off the start up and have plenty of power, this would be better. As Dell already partitions the hard drives of some models it would be more efficient and use less electric.
aikiwolfie
11/06/07		 :) Thanks. I'd go for a Linux version. Instant On Ubuntu 8.04 maybe. Well that wouldn't really be instant but much faster than a hard drive. Personally I'd like to see hard drives replaced completely or at the very least used for storing data and not the OS.
mdburkey
11/06/07		 Dell already has a theoretical "instant-on" OS on their laptops in the form of MediaDirect.
I say theoretical because it doesn't work worth crap -- it is nothing more than a stripped down build of Windows running a custom Cyberlink application. It takes almost as long to boot as Windows does, it is severely limited, and it has a nasty tendency to hose your partition table royally if you use any 3rd party system tools. Also, if it happens to crash inside MediaDirect -- which it does occasionally -- you end up with the active boot partition left set badly (which I can fix, but most of the people I do support for are completely clueless about).

I would like to see a REAL instant-on OS from Dell on their laptops especially.
Though I actually have already implemented one for my own unit -- it's a customized LFS (Linux From Scratch) build with MythTV on it.
It's lean, mean, and works nicely. I've got a read only SoftSuspend2 file that it always uses to start from and the boot partition is set RO with a writable user directory mounted for Myth config files. It takes about 15 seconds to start from scratch and does quite nicely as a video/DVD player.
premcv
11/07/07		 Interesting idea, jorge! This is better suited for Laptops, no?
phubert
11/07/07		 Phoenix hijacks Windows boot with instant-on

Is this Reg article the same thing??? ****

Phoenix says its new firmware product, called Hyperspace, allows PCs to quick-boot into a Linux environment for users to check their email, instant message, browse the web, or even play videos before Windows has got its boots on.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/06/phoenix_hyperspace_instant_boot/
mkmaster78
11/07/07		 Cool idea
mkmaster78
11/07/07		 Just wish somebody would write an instant on os that could be added at will to existing computers.
aikiwolfie
11/07/07		 That would require changing the boot process to remove all the redundant checks and setup that gets done. Which could be done with a new BIOS.
jorge
11/07/07		 @premcv: Imagine a server that needs to be rebooted, if its just seconds the service its running won't be down for long, so definitely needs to be on servers as well. Workstations/Desktops, well who wants to wait there as well? At least not my users.
premcv
11/07/07		 Yes jorge, in the time I pulled up some documents. Servers are also better suited also laptop users.
aikiwolfie
11/07/07		 It's fairly amazing the impact revising the boot process can make. One of the improvements to Gusty Gibbon which isn't talked about so much is it's slightly revised boot process. It is now very fast. I'd say about 30 seconds to a minute or so. Definitely faster than Feisty Fawn, SuSE or Windows.

And that is a good point about servers. But instant on OSs aren't designed to deal with servers. Certainly not anything high volume. I guess that's where we start moving to something more serious like solid state hard drives.
jorge
11/07/07		 Well some servers run services which are not memory hungry, they only need to process the service and all the time! I would find a really quick use of it on a server(s).
aikiwolfie
11/07/07		 But the volume of traffic could easily topple it which is why even very simple servers are normally run on robust operating systems.
jorge
11/07/07		 Well that depends, I don't think a server set up for a specific service would suffer from heavy traffic, it still has the processing power and if there's enough memory most of it could be in ram and that then would be rather fast and I'm sure would keep up. Just look at your routers, its basically a Quick ON OS and handles all the traffic.
aikiwolfie
11/07/07		 But routers do crash.
jorge
11/07/07		 Name one computing device that doesn't crash.
cosh
11/07/07		 Keyboard?
jorge
11/07/07		 Then why have I dumped out keyboards that no longer type out the key I push? I'm not talking worn out keys but a keyboard that emitted out the wrong character when a specific key was pressed. They crash.
aikiwolfie
11/07/07		 LMAO @ cosh!!!

A keyboard can't crash. It doesn't have an OS! Maybe your keyboard settings were wrong? Think of all those keyboards you've wasted. Can't say I've ever heard of that problem
phubert
11/07/07		 Well, I remember green screen keyboard w. onboard z80 chips... so the PC kinds has nothing???

Drop it from a hundred feet or so and I think it may crash... :-D
jorge
11/07/07		 No the keyboard chips went awry, there's no settings to access BIOS, I call that a crash, but really a bad chip but then again when a computer goes bad a bad chip is also usually the cause, like when a drive dies, some times the controller board goes and if you are lucky to have an identical drive you can swap out the controller board and still access the data, because the actual disks are ok.
mdburkey
11/07/07		 Any software CAN crash -- especially given faults in hardware. The issue is how often does it happen and is it the exception or the norm.

Well written software should run stably FOREVER without crashing as long as all the subsystems it relies on are also stable.

I have spent 20 years writing embedded software for everything from TV's to settop boxes to aviation test gear and if you take your time and design your system properly, you CAN make robust systems that are stable year in and year out -- at least for a small system with only one or two functions. The first step to doing this properly is to chuck the concept of a general purpose OS entirely. Linux isn't bad but it is still not 100% bulletproof. QNX is better. A hand written, optimized system that is basically a "while (1)" loop can be 100% stable if implemented properly (and given no hardware problems or compiler bugs). Unfortunately, for the sake of expediency and due to the complexity of tasks like parsing an ATSC stream, even most TV's no longer go this route any more.

On one project I worked on, which was an "entertainment PC / Media Access Terminal", we had the entire instant on concept down quite well and understood quite fully how woefully inadequate Windows was to the task. Our system had a Windows boot partition -- for when you wanted/needed Windows, but for everything else, we had a second QNX (Neutrino) partition that launched in seconds. Additionally, we had a secondary 8051 microprocessor with custom firmware that handled all IR receiving tasks, AV switching, amplifier control, PS/2 keyboard control, etc. -- most of it without intervention from the host processor -- we just notified it of keypresses and allowed it to interrogate the 8051 for it's current state. So even if the OS did happen to crash, the 8051 kept all the AV and remote handling running, monitored the OS as a watchdog and restarted it seamlessly within seconds when it did crash. We also had a custom Xilinx part on the 8051 board to handle more specialized tasks when needed (which was loaded from SRAM that was accesible from the 8051 -- so we could change the VHDL code on the fly if different functions were needed). The video processing/TV passthru/Mpeg Decode/Mpeg Encode for the system was handled by a separate MIPS/DSP core (a slightly overclocked 8x8 VCP) that also operated asynchronously from the host OS -- which also made it virtually immune to system crashes. In a worst case, the system might have gone unresponsive or the pretty channel displays might have disappeared for a few seconds while the OS restarted itself, but the video and audio would have continued on. Even channel tuning and volume would have worked -- they were handled directly by the 8051 and the host PC was merely handling overlay displays. When you are doing a system that is aimed at watching live TV, you do NOT want a crash to happen while someone is watching something major (like the Super Bowl). Heck, we had even implemented TIVO like record/pause capability for live TV (though it probably wouldn't have made it into the final product as it looked rather poor because it was low bitrate MPEG1 -- which was all the VCP could handle [and barely at that]). Unfortunately, due to corporate stupidity, the project got cancelled within a month of our first demo. What is even more irritating about this is that this was in *1995-1996*.

Quite frankly, this entire discussion irritates the crap out of me BECAUSE IT IS NOTHING NEW. The entire instant on concept should have happened YEARS ago and could have had companies had even an iota of sense about them.

Instead, I see more and more functionality being heaped onto Windows and more and more dependancy being placed on the main processor.

The better solution is to have a small, cheap embedded processor that can serve as a watchdog for the system and manage simple tasks and simple functions. A single chip ARM solution running Linux (even though it's not perfect) would be a very nice solution to this problem. For that matter, for the number of gates involved, a simple 8051 or MIPS solution could easily be merged into the motherboard chipset itself (the PS/2 keyboard controller is nothing more than an 8042 anyway and it already IS there).
jorge
11/07/07		 Yea, its nothing new, but for Dell and PC in general use, it is new, unfortunately. I have also done some work on embedded systems and always amazed me how one simple well thought out while(1) loop ran forever! Well at least till a customer messed with the box, can't keep them from trying to peek in on a bunch of chips on a board for some reason. I've always dreamed of extra add on boards on the bus to do stuff like that but moved on to IT before that could be done. There is a company that has such a board to evaluate systems for performance and what not, forget the name.
mdburkey
11/07/07		 jorge - Heh, keeping customers from messing with the chips in the boxes on most of my earlier embedded projects was never much of a problem. Most of them were TV's -- and for some strange reason most people tend to shy away from mucking about in an active CRT (could have something to do with the flyback pumping 20-30kV up to the tube).

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, for my own laptop I've got a custom Linux/Myth partition that works well enough for my own purposes.
I've also got a a dinky Silicon Labs 8051 eval board sitting in a drive bay on my desktop right now -- which is interfaced via USB and flash updatable. It came with a crappy little LCD on the board, but I desoldered it and currently have it tied to an old Noritake VFD from the 1996 project. It ain't fancy, but the VFD is cool to play with -- and since its got its own processor and gets power from USB (which gets its current from the 5V standby supply) it's active even when the PC is off. I'll probably migrate it to my Media Center PC eventually so it can still show a "VCR style" clock even when the system is in Standby or Off.

This is one area where the new Vista "SideShow" display/processor intrigues me -- or at least it would if it weren't tied to Vista and Windows Mobile (nee WinCE) -- which is what I do whenever I have to work on that POS (wince that is).
mdburkey
11/08/07		 PS @ cosh & others...

Keyboards can crash -- not often -- but that is generally a symptom of a hardware problem not a software problem.

I say generally though, because SOME keyboards actually have firmware bugs in them. Most PS/2 style keyboards actually contain an 8048 microprocessor which interfaces to the 8042 microprocessor that serves as the keyboard controller on the motherboard (which is now typically implemented as a chunk of VHDL embedded in the core logic chipset). These micros DO have software and some DO have bugs.

Any new keyboards, which are USB, always have an embedded processor of some sort that handles the scanning of the keyboard matrix and handles the USB interface (often an 8051 derived Cypress, Philips, or Silicon Labs part or similar). These can & do have bugs as well -- especially in the USB interface handling routines. IMHO USB is a poor excuse for a bus design and FAR too complicated with way too much overhead to be handling something as rudimentary and necessary as the keyboard.
winoffice
11/26/07		 I hate Phoenix for this Hyperspace product (okay this is an exaggeration) :-(, but luckily I do not use Phoenix firmware :-)!
jorge
11/26/07		 If you own a Dell you do.
winoffice
11/26/07		 jorge: Dell makes its own BIOSes these days. I have not seen a single Phoenix BIOS on a Dell since 2003.
aikiwolfie
11/26/07		 Just because it says Dell on the screen doesn't mean Dell actually wrote it.
jorge
11/26/07		 LOL! The logo you see is only the logo they make Phoenix pop up so you don't see their logo, there's a few people who have successfully installed non-Dell Bios's to activate features blocked by Dell's version, mainly on older models, I haven't kept up with it but they're out there.
cosh
11/26/07		 Interesting....
winoffice
11/26/07		 jorge, aikiwolfie - whenever I use a Phoenix BIOS (my Inspiron 7000 has one) I see "PhoenixBIOS" on one of the BIOS pages and possibly on the Dell opening screen with the progress bar. I cannot see it anywhere on newer Dell systems though, so I conclude that Phoenix does not make BIOSes for Dell systems any longer. Besides, Phoenix BIOSes had a different interface compared to BIOSes for newer Dell systems.
phubert
11/27/07		 Anyone have a list of the common BIOS on systems (not only Dell, of course). Just now, Phoenix is all I remember (yeah, I know: GOOGLE .. too lazy just now)
aikiwolfie
May 15		 Asus it seems have decided to ship Splashtop on ALL of it's motherboards. No wonder Microsoft cossied up to them with XP on the new Eee PC 900. Oh and this instant on thing is LINUX based. :o)
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