Re: New Pico2

In article <v9j2na$j4rf$1@dont-email.me>, druck  <news@druck.org.uk> wrote:

On 14/08/2024 20:07, john larkin wrote:

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 19:40:25 +0100, Chris Townley <news@cct-net.co.uk>

Not sure about that - in the late 80's our Vax8530 took about 30 mins
for a reboot.
>
My X86 VMS instance in a VM on modest hardware, takes less than a minute
to reboot

 
MS-DOS was a lot faster, on a 2 MHz 8088.
The BBC Micro (2MHz 6502) was even faster booting from it's OS ROM.

The longest part was doing the startup beep.

Boot times are always a somewhat interesting subjest - Yes, the Beeb
and Apple II spend more time doing the Beep at startup than anything
else. the Beeb had an advantage over the Apple II in that the filing
system was in ROM where on the Apple II it had to boot from a small PROM
on the disk controller card then load up DOS which took extra seconds...

Booting a Pi can appear to take a long time, but most of that is the
stuff post-kernel being loaded. I have my own little bare-metal OS for
the Pi and it loads and can be running in well under a second - unless
I want USB and that, for some reason takes another second to initialise
(it's not my code, I stole it from elsewhere - there's only so much you
can do on your own on something as complex as a Pi these days)

I like the idea of the Pico 2 and my even look at it - I wrote my little
OS initially on the 65816 then migrated it to RISC-V and this is a very
nice RISC-V platform for it - decent RAM, nice peripherals and a 2nd
CPU too.

I have also ported it to ARM (on the Pi v1) but it's ARM32 assembler
and I'm not sure I fancy re-writing it (again) in Thumb32 instructions...

-Gordon