[badass]

Originally Posted by directhex

BeOS had boot times around 6 seconds on my old p2-400

And there we have evidence that the hardware is not what's causing modern OS's to take forever.
IIRC BeOS was a ground up new OS. I remember holding much hope for it before it flopped.

Originally Posted by dangel

Well, two things came immediately to mind - first standby (default on Vista), and second hibernation. Then again, I don't really have an issues with boot time (thanks to superfetch) except on laptops which have ****-slow hd's. Of course, resume issues can occur thanks to duff drivers - and vista has facilities to help you locate the sluggish drivers on your system. Watch the hibernation loading bar - that's a fair indicator of how long it takes the kernel to page in the saved RAM image, the rest is just waiting for drivers/services to initialise.

My last Amiga, the A4000 - with a 68060 and a Picasso took a lot longer to startup than six seconds (from hard drive). Depends what you consider the OS - kickstart was in ROM, workbench etc wasn't.

How long does your machine take to boot though? 40 seconds? Admittedly quick enough but it could be a lot quicker. For reference the machine that took 6 seconds to boot was an A1200 with a 170 MB HDD. I later put a 68060 board in it with 8MB - later upgraded to 32MB RAM and it did not affect boot times.

Originally Posted by Steve

Let's ignore the boot process and assume we're resuming from hibernation.

How many devices are there on the system? Not just peripherals, but devices... timers, DMAs, interfaces etc.

Now the idea of hibernation is that you dump your whole memory onto disk, then load it back up and pretend like nothing every happened. Except it's a lot more complicated than that.

Lots of these devices, that you've just woken up from 'cold' again, only expose certain parts of their registers and internal workings to the system through memory mapping. They may need some initialisation procedure to bring them back to the pre-hibernation state. You can't just write the registers back and hope for the best. So every driver needs to know what to do when the OS says "Oh hi, I'm coming out of hibernation, sort your device out plz".

And that's just one example of what complicates and slows down coming out of hibernation.

On the whole hibernation front - to speed boot up times it is a bodge. From a keeping various apps open in the same state as you left them it is good.

I suppose when I'm saying that all "modern" OS's aren't as good - reletively speaking - for home users compared to what they once were is down to a few things:
1. They take excessively long to boot
2. They are too resource hungry
3. They over complicate things

I'l add that thats obviously not all down to their makers. The companies that provide the hardware and drivers are just as responsible.
It comes down to the lazy short termism that was introduced to the market by Microsoft and IBM all of those years ago.
Did you know that until around 2002 - around 4 years after Windows update was rolled out, it was still completely stupid? If you didn't reboot the computer aftter each update was applied, you simply cound not guarentee they had installed properly. Then they finally worked out that before queuing a file to be changed on next reboot, the updates should check to see if another update had also queued the change and was in fact going to install a newer version of the file already.
Lazy and dumb. For 4 years.