MontaVista shows one-second Linux boot

MontaVista Software has demonstrated its embedded Linux distribution booting in one second, which the company says is a first for embedded Linux.

At the Virtual Freescale Technology Forum on Tuesday, MontaVista demonstrated an application running on MontaVista Linux Professional Edition and Freescale Semiconductor MPC5121e hardware. The goal was for the application to begin displaying real-time data in one second or less, MontaVista said.

The company said it achieved the low boot time through tuning the software stack, along with the use of an optimised kernel.

The optimisation technology is intended for applications such as industrial automation, automotive, aerospace and military, and is designed to allow the software to respond to factors such as power fluctuation, network failure, device availability and memory management without delaying its ability to function, MontaVista said.

The latest Linux kernel, version 2.6.30, released in June, includes modifications intended to make the kernel boot faster.

Desktop distribution-makers Red Hat and Canonical have also included work to reduce boot times in Red Hat's Fedora 11, released in June, and Canonical's Ubuntu 9.04, released in April. Red Hat said its operating system should generally boot in around 20 seconds.