[openbeos] Re: x86 boot loader milestone



Michael Phipps wrote:
The truth is, as fast as BeOS (esp off of compact flash) boots, there is little benefit to doing this. You might save a whole second or something. Investigating a faster BIOS (i.e. LinuxBios) makes a whole lot more sense, from a "speed up the boot process" point of view, than looking at this. I considered the same things but don't think that it is worth bothering with. That's just my POV on it.

OTOH, I think that this could be a huge feature if it had nothing to do with bootup. How cool would it be if you could hit some key combo and the system would freeze for a few seconds, pouring data onto the HD. When it was done, you would have a complete, bootable image of exactly where you where at that moment? Not to save boot time, but for other things - like saving all of your apps exactly where they were. This would also work better than a boot setup because you would restore user processes, not kernel processes. Things like drivers need to init properly. You can't have an image do that without special knowledge. OTOH, if you boot to a normal (open)BeOS kernel with new driver instances and all, then restore the userland processes, that might work better.


Sounds very much like the Hibernate function in WinXP (in my pre-morning-coffee state of mind) and I really do think this one is something really (really really) nice to have. Especially for laptopsusers like myself. One of the most common scenarios at work is when working at a project and somwhere in the middle realizing that "gosh... I have to discuss this with <insert-customer-name>". To be able to just close the lid (tied to Hibernate), get to the customer, open the lid (thus powering on) and simply discuss the code without having to open all the programs and stuff and risking loosing my thoughts while browsing through other code while looking for the 'spot'. That is wonderful. And if Walt... OBOS would be able to do it without choking on removed components (like PCMCIA-cards and USB-devices) the way WinXP does, it'd be just marvellous.


Err... did this make sense? (need food... and coffee...)

//Sam Persson

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