The faster the machines get, the slower they boot!!! Why can't Dell make servers boot to Linux in 10-20 seconds? My Raspberry Pi boots faster. It would cost zero dollars, would delight your customers, and would make machines come back online faster after a power failure or crash. It takes a couple minutes to boot one of these R720s, but from a pure hardware perspective I don't see any reason why it couldn't be 3-5 seconds to just put the hardware in a known operating state and hand off to the OS boot loader. Nowadays Linux boots in about 10-20 sec (depending on whether SSD is used to boot it). The operating system resets all the hardware anyway, so why go through this lengthy startup procedure? What is particularly annoying:
- you wait N seconds for each component in case user wants to stop and edit settings for it, rather than just letting the user hit one key such as F2 that puts them into a menu where they can select all the different hardware settings to edit.
- you initialize components one-at-a-time. While it might be desirable in diagnostic modes to be able to do this, the normal mode of operation should be to initialize all components in parallel, and only those components that the operating system doesn't already initialize on its own! If a failure occurs in parallel initialization, fall back to serial initialization.
- bloatware should be banned at the BIOS level unless the user requests a menu (such as hitting F2). That's what we have operating systems for, to manage the hardware, so boot the operating system and let us manage it from there, unless the operating system won't boot or you actually need to change something at the BIOS level.
thanks for listening