Not content with simply replicating Windows 7 boot times in its upcoming Windows 8 OS, Microsoft is speeding things up. And for good reason, explained Stephen Sinofsky, Windows Live President. "No feature gets talked about and measured more [than boot time]," wrote Sinofsky at the Building Windows 8 blog.
Cutting down on boot-ups and minimizing the amount of reboots following patch downloads are core design tenets for Windows 8, he explained. However, the ultimate goal is faster boot times period. The executive claims it's mission accomplished. "We made a bigger leap in this area with Windows 8 than we have in a long time," said Sinofsky.
Gabe Aul, Windows program management director, echoed Sinofsky's comments.
"Few operations in Windows are as scrutinized, measured, and picked apart as boot," Aul said. "This is understandable - boot times represent an effective proxy for overall system performance and we all know the boot experience is an incredibly important thing for us to get right for customers."
Aul conceded that previous improvements would not suffice and that Windows 8 needed to do three things: draw zero watts when turned off; begin a new session when it's booted; and cut down on time spent by customers between power-up and computer access.
"In Windows 7 we made many improvements to the boot path, including parallel initialization of device drivers, and trigger-start services, but it was clear we'd have to get even more creative (and less incremental) if we hoped to get boot performance anywhere close to fast enough to meet all of these needs," said Aul. "Our solution is a new fast startup mode which is a hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate."
Following an in-depth explanation of the behind-the-scenes details of a normal Windows 7 boot-up, Aul described how Windows 8 would build on that foundation to speed up the process for customers with both new and old systems regardless of their preferred storage solution:
Now here's the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you're not familiar with hibernation, we're effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory.
According to Aul, tests employing the new hybrid technique yielded boot-ups which were up to 70 percent faster than traditional sequences.
"It's faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it's also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents," Aul said.
A pleasant side-effect of the new method are faster hibernation resumes, he added.
Microsoft has previously touted enhanced ISO support, a new Explorer interface and myriad copy management improvements for Windows 8. A release date, however, has yet to be confirmed.
What do you think about the new Windows 8 boot-up tweaks? Let us know in the comment section.
