Lenovo's 7-second boot with EE 2.0: What's the secret?

[hendhess]

Hi everyone,

I understand that a combination of factors including UEFI (instead of the traditional BIOS), drivers and solid-state media have a lot to do with Lenovo's upcoming PCs with sub 10-second boot times.

http://www.lenovoblogs.com/lenovofiles/ ... d-pc-boot/

Whenever I try to tweak anything, the boot time gets worse. The best I have is about 21 seconds on an X60s with a solid state disk, but even if I ignored the BIOS time, it's still a good 10 seconds longer than what Lenovo is achieving with EE 2.0. What did Lenovo do in Windows 7 to achieve this? Has anyone here been able to achieve similar results on their ThinkPad? It seems even faster than a clean Windows 7 installation.

I'm probably being too crazy about a measly 10 extra seconds. I admit that I almost exclusively use sleep/resume. But for those 'once in a while' restarts after Windows Update, I would certainly welcome a somewhat faster boot, even though I can't reap the advantages of UEFI on my ThinkPad. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated...

[Brian10161]

I'm interested in find out how they do it too. I always shut down my PCs, so it would be cool to know.

I find the same thing as you though, I tweak my computers and usually the boot time gets worse. Never really figured out why, but oh well.

[ThinkRob]

Has anyone here been able to achieve similar results on their ThinkPad?

Yes, but not with Windows. I got an X61s down to a 6-7 second boot (*including* POST) of Debian Lenny using an Intel X25 SSD, a custom kernel, and a heck of a lot of init script hacking. My advice: don't bother. You shouldn't spend that much time booting anyways...

[topmahof]

One of the reasons linux is so fast is that grub uses EFI. It has since around 2000. Hp's have had it since around 2007. Apple has had it for awhile. Lenovo just made sure they had it down to a science before they implemented it.

The reason it works so well is the old slow bios hands off booting duties to UEFI which all it is is a loader that resides on the hard drive. The bios has to identify all the drivers for the hardware before it can boot, UEFI doesn't have to coz it already has.

That's it in a basic nutshell the way I understand it.

[Harryc]

Lenovo has never published information about the tweaks that were done to achieve EE. I suspect they'd be protective against competitors lifting the technology.

[ThinkRob]

One of the reasons linux is so fast is that grub uses EFI. It has since around 2000. Hp's have had it since around 2007. Apple has had it for awhile. Lenovo just made sure they had it down to a science before they implemented it.

None of the default installs of Debian or Ubuntu that I've seen on any PC laptop have used grub-efi. They've all used the PC/BIOS variant (aka. the grub-pc package in Debian and its derivatives).

[s1148625]

EE 2.0 also uses GPT formatted drives, which may theoretically speed things up over NTFS.

[topmahof]

ThinkRob:

http://blog.fpmurphy.com/2010/03/grub2-efi-support.html

You're right, none of the default installs, I'm just saying it's been around since legacy grub. It needs to be configured, but a lot of people used it. The newest thing is Grub2. I played with it for awhile on a cf card to try to get it to boot faster, but I didn't have much luck with it.

There is a Fedora live version out with efi on it already.

[ThinkRob]

You're right, none of the default installs, I'm just saying it's been around since legacy grub. It needs to be configured, but a lot of people used it. The newest thing is Grub2. I played with it for awhile on a cf card to try to get it to boot faster, but I didn't have much luck with it.

There is a Fedora live version out with efi on it already.

Oh, I know it's well-supported -- just that it doesn't get used much in practice. I've used it as well (albeit on an Intel Mac), and I can't say I found any notable advantage performance-wise.

You know what *does* help a lot? Pre-populated /dev hierarchies for hardware that's static. It's also a royal pain to set up though, and rarely worth the trouble.

Really, I'm always a little perplexed by this obsession with boot times. I mean, sure, I spent some time seeing how fast I could get my machine to boot, but that was purely academic; I did it to see if I could, and because it was a good way to learn more about the boot process. I reboot my non-kernel-dev machines about once per day. Even if that takes an extra minute, so what?

[topmahof]

I totally agree with you. I tried it coz I could. In the end I always went back to the tried and true. When this efi thing first came out, I thought it was supposed to "replace" the bios. Turns out it's really just an interface between the bios and the os. Just another thing to bust, I guess.

[hendhess]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the extensive feedback. I agree that I'm being too obsessive about this.

I should just chill for 20 seconds when swapping batteries. I can't resume from hibernation in less than 15 seconds, either (unless I reduced my RAM to 1 GB, ha!).

Some models with the old-school BIOS were interesting -- Upon resuming from hibernation, the Phoenix BIOS screen would flash for only a split second, and the resume process would begin immediately after that. I recall seeing it on some older UMPCs. I wonder if anyone here's customized the X60s ThinkPad BIOS in a similar fashion...

[crashnburn]

Any magic in this space?

[warhamstr]

I'm very interested at the fact that the boot screens stays black until the full Win7 desktop appears. I really want to know how thats done, personally I think there is some time to win.

My R500 boots in 30 sec. including bios load, so from pressing the powerbutton till the desktop appears. But I know it can do faster than that!

[crashnburn]

Did people actually experience the 7 second boot?

Can someone vouch for it?

[s1148625]

I'm seeing around 13-16 second boot on my T420, although my ssd is slightly slower for booting (Crucial M225), and I've got the usual suspects that auto-start with the computer. With a completely clean install and no additional startup programs, I wasn't far off from the 8 second mark. To achieve this, I had to do a clean native-mode EFI install to a GPT partition on the drive. Once I upgrade to a Vertex 3, I'll let you know what my boot times are.

[crashnburn]

I'm seeing around 13-16 second boot on my T420, although my ssd is slightly slower for booting (Crucial M225), and I've got the usual suspects that auto-start with the computer. With a completely clean install and no additional startup programs, I wasn't far off from the 8 second mark. To achieve this, I had to do a clean native-mode EFI install to a GPT partition on the drive. Once I upgrade to a Vertex 3, I'll let you know what my boot times are.

You got this with the Lenovo EE or by your own install? I am guessing your experience is because of the SSD.

Was the OP's originally outlined 7 second EE install tested on HDD or SSD?

[s1148625]

This was with a clean install. All of the Lenovo EE boot times under 30 seconds are achieved with a solid state drive.

The additional time savings (aside from UEFI, and GPT disk format) are mostly achieved by delayed startup of certain drivers and devices (they talked about this in one of the YouTube videos where they showed a T400 that had been outfitted with UEFI to replace the BIOS). For example, one tweak is that they have it set so the driver for the webcam loads later, so unless you're using your webcam within 90 seconds of bootup, you'll never know a difference.

I would imagine that with a bit of creativity going through the services and delaying startup of non-critical ones would allow you to achieve something very similar to an EE install, if not entirely the same.

[crashnburn]

This was with a clean install. All of the Lenovo EE boot times under 30 seconds are achieved with a solid state drive.

The additional time savings (aside from UEFI, and GPT disk format) are mostly achieved by delayed startup of certain drivers and devices (they talked about this in one of the YouTube videos where they showed a T400 that had been outfitted with UEFI to replace the BIOS). For example, one tweak is that they have it set so the driver for the webcam loads later, so unless you're using your webcam within 90 seconds of bootup, you'll never know a difference.

I would imagine that with a bit of creativity going through the services and delaying startup of non-critical ones would allow you to achieve something very similar to an EE install, if not entirely the same.

How and where can we define these 'delayed' & 'background' loading for drivers and other stuff, while the foreground remains functional? (even thought I've used Services.msc.. I dont see how these things can be 'strategically' delayed?)
Where can I get a guide/ manual / how to - do for this?

PS: Is it possible to use UEFI on a T61/ X61T or W510?

[sarbin]

^^^
re: delayed driver start...
launch services.msc, double click any driver and select "Automatic (Delayed Start)" in the start-up type drop-down.

hth.

[medeiom]

Have you guys tried this, it worked for me..

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-a ... a-p/451673