Fast boot times are key in the medical device market, where products compete on "time to waveform" (TTW), General Software said. Yet, most BIOSes available for x86 chipsets were built for the desktop market, and thus have not been optimized in this area, according to Steve Jones, General Software CTO.
Jones explained, "Hard drive spin-up normally takes so long that the BIOS has to wait for it anyway. Take away the spin-up time and you're left with POST that should complete in hundreds of milliseconds, but instead takes tens of seconds."
Jones said that after hard drive spin-up delays, waiting for video card firmware to load is another major time-waster. "Depending on the video controller, it can take between 0.5 and 5 seconds, typically. Next to hard drive spin-up, this is actually the most significant part of POST and accounts for most of the time spent in the one-second measurement here. Other things, like keyboard controller initialization, mouse and keyboard device initialization, and USB initialization, all take hundreds of microseconds, and basically nickel-and-dime the POST time."
Jones said the claimed Vista boot time was achieved on a reference motherboard using an Intel 855GME chipset and a Samsung Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (HHD). Less than a second elapsed between the time the reset button was pressed and the moment when control transfered to the Windows Vista loader, showing that the drive was being read. Within 24 seconds, the Vista desktop was fully available. An otherwise-identical system using a traditional BIOS took more than 72 seconds, according to the company.
Jones said the feat was accomplished by using "Quick Boot" tuning tools available in the General Software Embedded BIOS Adaptation Kit, which is said to offer more than 1,000 configuration options at the source level. Using it, General Software or Kit licensees can tune x86 BIOS code to specific hardware, eliminating the time-consuming scans and unneeded code branches found in desktop x86 BIOS code. Another touted benefit is faster certification, since there are fewer code-paths to test.
Traditional BIOSes use slow PIO (programmed I/O) data transfers to get an operating system's kernel from a disk drive into memory, according to General Software. In contrast, the company's Embedded BIOS has its own Ultra DMA-capable driver, so it can perform transfers at the drive's maximum speed even before the Vista kernel and disk driver are loaded. This UDMA support is a major factor in the faster boot time, the company says.
General Software first introduced its
Embedded BIOS with StrongFrame Technology last year, targeting Windows CE, XP, and Vista systems as well as Linux. Medical device customers include Siemens Acuson and GE Healthcare. Customers producing more general-purpose Windows devices include OQO and FlipStart, according to the company.
AvailabilityEmbedded BIOS with StrongFrame Technology is available now for a wide variety of devices, including medical equipment.
Related stories:
