On Tuesday 09 February 2010, Dave McGuire wrote:
Feelings? No, experience. Big difference.
Experience with and
knowledge of the past. There is NO RATIONAL REASON why a GUI-based
OS should need more than a billion bytes of memory and a billion-plus
clock cycles per second just to boot. You and I (and many others on
this list) have plenty of examples of machines that do the same thing
with a tiny fraction of those resources.
Minor nit to pick... most of the "billion-plus" cycles per second spent
on booting are spent waiting on I/O. If you look at the amount of time
it takes to boot the same OS in a virtualized environment (and thus has
some reasonable caching going on by the host OS, and emulated hardware
devices), it'll shrink a lot.
And I'm mostly speaking from the experience of running Linux under Xen,
but even Windows Server 2008 under VirtualBox seemed to yield similar
results, when I set that up for a friend.
Pat
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