Are very short boot times possible?

Product support balenaOS
1

Has anyone managed to get boot time down into the 2 – 4 second range using balenaOS?

I’m building a device for children and they won’t have the patience to wait the 40 – 60 seconds I’m seeing to boot the web frame project on a Raspberry Pi 3+!

I see this link on Github but it doesn’t look like this has been a priority yet.

Regards,
Michael

2

Hey @michaelmarconi, we were looking into speeding up boots, and indeed those are the times I’ve seen last time I’ve checked for Raspberry Pi 3 (somewhere in the 10s of seconds, application can be running at ~25 seconds system uptime, but there’s some u-boot time to add to it)

The 2-3s boot is something you’ve seen on the Pi 3 with any other operating system? I wonder if there’s any other system that we can compare things with.

3

Hi @imrehg, thanks for replying. I suspect it’s impossible to achieve 2–3 second boots with the Pi, however it is possible with other hardware. See:


Ideally, I could have the manageability of a container-based approach with these kinds of boot times but I’m not sure if that’s yet possible with balena in the mix?