Linux boots in one second

Montavista has recently created a record for boot time of embedded Linux. They booted it in one second! This significant achievement is made on Freescale MPC5121E RISC processor. Please look at the demo in the Freescale technology forum. This is undeniably a great achievement.

The application requirements demanded visual feedback of critical real-time data in one second or less from cold power-on. These performance improvements were achieved through a combination of careful tuning of the entire software stack and a highly optimized kernel.

It would be great if the Montavista team publishes a whitepaper on what the team did to achieve this performance. The usual techniques for speeding up boot loading includes Kernal Execute-In-Place, which involves executing the Kernel from Flash memory, and copying Kernal using DMA. Many times, just by increasing the decompression speed by fast decompressors like UCL would do the job. It may not be a surprize if Montavista uses all these together, along with something special. Lets wait and hope that they throw more light on their careful tuning and Kernel optimization to acheive this.