Microsoft has begun a series of blog posts on the fundamental aspects of the Windows 8 operating system. The first of which focuses on the attention it’s paying to delivering industry leading boot times to the operating system.
The new solution to reducing boot times represents a blend of the traditional cold boot process and resuming a system from hibernate. Currently in a traditional shutdown all user sessions and kernel sessions are closed, resulting in a total shutdown. With Windows 8 however whilst user session will be closed the kernel session will be hibernated. Then upon system boot Microsoft claim this will deliver an improvement of up to 70% in boot time.
Hibernating the kernel session lends a hand to ensuring that the system is doing less work than during a full system boot, and multi-phase resume capability means that all CPU cores - in a multi-core system - will work in parallel to read and decompress the contents of the hibernation file.
Users will still have the opportunity to revert back to a traditional shutdown/boot process, should they choose, and whilst we're told that the benefits of the initiative will be enjoyed by HDD-based systems, the company calls the experience with faster SSDs, 'downright amazing'.
