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The Secret To a Ten Second Boot: Eliminate BIOS?

Posted on 28. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in Tips

Do you ever find yourself sitting around waiting for your computer to boot? While I always seem to hear about the newest computers having faster boot times, I never have perceived any sort of difference in speed. Along with using solid state drives, the next generation of computers is supposedly going to eliminate the decades-old BIOS startup system which is essentially software that talks directly to your hardware prior to operating system startup.

Witness this test by some Lenovo engineers. As far as I can tell, no special effects were involved, although one may consider that to be the case since this laptop boots up so fast.

The technology is called UEFI, which stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface and one of the earliest OSs to support it was – surprise – Linux. While the Chromium site has no reference to UEFI, it sure is certain that the team is working on a custom BIOS. That means, according to this video, moving hardware initialization from the firmware to the kernel, among other optimizations.

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1. Is Dual-Boot the Best Option For a Google Machine?
2. Video: Comparing Boot Times Between Different OSs
3. Video: OS Boot Speed Test

Tags: BIOS, Chrome OS customized BIOS, Chrome OS fast boot, Chrome OS solid state drives, computers boot too slow, Google custom BIOS, ten second boot, UEFI, UEFI Google, UEFI Lenovo