Intel has detailed plans to tweak a Linux-based operating system to boot in just two seconds. It hopes such speed will make Moblin the natural choice for uses such as computer systems built directly into cars.

Ihmad Sosou, the man in charge of open source technology at Intel, spoke at a Linux summit this week. He discussed plans for the second edition of Moblin, a system designed for use on Intel’s Atom chip which appears in devices such as netbooks.

The plan for Moblin is to be able to offer hardware and an operating system as a single package for device manufacturers. As well as saving hassle for manufacturers, doing so would mean greater consistency across devices: there’d be less need to worry about the same task working in different ways on different products in a range.

However, it’s not clear how many manufacturers would consider the single package approach to be best for their needs. Many will prefer the flexibility of sourcing hardware components and software separately: indeed, such flexibility is often a major reason for using Linux in the first place.

The second edition of Moblin is currently capable of booting in five seconds, but Sosou says two seconds is an achievable goal. That would be a major advantage for selling to car firms to use for in-car systems where even an extra three-second wait is enough to cause problems and make the system noticeably less-than-seamless.

Sosou hinted that slimming down the system will be the key to shaving off boot time. He’s not convinced by strategies to speed the process by running multiple booting tasks at once: “Parallelized bloat is still bloat.”

Intel is also revising Moblin to take advantage of its purchase of OpenedHand last year, the firm behind the Clutter system designed to produce clean and crisp user interfaces.

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Entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 1:37 pm under Intel, Open source.

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