It is said a picture is worth a 1000 words. In this case, instead of a picture, the following video demonstrates Linux booting to a GUI in a mere 1 second.
And this is what the people who implemented this awesome feat have to say about this exercise (and I quote).
Many people see a demo like this and assume there are ’smoke and mirrors’ or that we’ve implemented a suspend to disk solution. This is genuinely a cold boot including UBoot (2009-01), Linux kernel (2.6.31-rc7) and Qt Embedded Open Source 4.6.2. We’ve not applied any specific intellectual property but instead spent time analysing where boot delays are coming from and simply optimising them away. The majority of the modifications we make usually fall into the category of ‘removing things that aren’t required’, ‘optimising things that are required’, or ‘taking a new approach to solving problems’ and are tailored very precisely to the needs of the ‘product’.If you want to dig a bit more into the process of achieving the 1 second boot, do check out these slides from the same author.
