Bootless Boot: Reducing Device Boot Latency with Byte Addressable NVRAM

Abstract

Booting is an essential process that loads an operating system (OS) to a main memory and initializes all the system. In this paper, we propose a new technique to shorten the boot-up time by using a non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM). This technique eliminates the kernel loading, the kernel decompression, and the reallocation of a kernel image by maintaining of the linux binary image at the non-volatile random access memory. The essence of locating OS binary image at NVRAM lies in how to re-initialize the segments that are updated as OS executes and have been initialized implicitly while OS is loaded onto memory from the storage device. We develop a Bootless Boot which completely removes the process of loading any of the kernel images. Bootless Boot consists of (i) object filter which identifies the kernel objects which need to be initialized every time OS boots up, (ii) explicit initialization module which explicitly re-initializes the objects identified by the object filter. Explicit initialization module is added to the linux kernel.

LASER: Latency-Aware Segment Relocation for non-volatile memory

“…Kim et al [19] address NVRAM to reduce the device startup latency by merging a portion of read only section on kernel image. Lee et al [20] go a step further than providing optimized scheme for segments described in Kim et al [19]. They provide an object filter to analyze the volatile attribute of variables in codes.…”

Twizzler: A Data-centric OS for Non-volatile Memory

“…While Moneta focused on I/O performance, not on rethinking the system stack, we leverage their approach to reduce OS overhead as much as possible, even when the OS must intervene. Lee and Won [43] considered the impact of NVM on system initialization by addressing the issue of system boot as a way to restore the system to a known state; we may need to include similar techniques to address the problem of system corruption.…”

Reducing the User-perceived Latency of Browsers with NVRAM

“…In [10], the authors proposed a technique to shorten the booting time by using NVRAM. It eliminates kernel loading and decompression steps by maintaining the kernel image on the NVRAM.…”