My boot time is as long as my system needs it to be. I would guess it takes between 15 and 30 seconds, depending on memory retraining, verification, and my attention to it. Honestly I don't even notice as I'm still getting my desk ready, setting my coffee or water on the corner of my desk, and planning my work.

Booting from a USB drive to do offline backups or system maintenance can take longer than booting from an NVME drive, but in that case I'm watching for the "press any key to boot" message displayed

Used to take several minutes in the nineties.

I remember noticing a huge speedup at some point, seemed like only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt. This was 20(?) years ago when I was still building my own towers. Then something happened, I'll guess 10-15 years ago ... my next laptop took that long just to ask for the full disk decryption key. My latest laptop sometimes takes 30 seconds just to ask for the decryption key. No messages, nothing. After that, it's still only 5-10 seconds to get the login prompt.

Of course, this is all from memory, n

My fedora workstation boots today in about the same time as it did 10 or even 20 years ago of in honest. UEFI is definitely not fast to get to the grub screen. But after that takes about 30 seconds to get to the login screen which isn't impressive IMO. Done of that is zfs importing and getting the root filesystem up.

Windows 11 boots in about half the time. Although I just worked on a laptop that windows 10 took about 5 minutes to boot and 10 minutes to get usable.

Startup finished in 22.005s (firmware) + 9.474s (loader) + 7.889s (kernel) + 35.420s (userspace) = 1min 14.790s graphical.target reached after 35.417s in userspace. Wonder if the motherboard that's replacing my AsRock x870 steel legend with 2x32gb will POST any faster, my Gigabyte B850 server board with 4x32gb of the same sticks POSTS faster. Almost all of the userspace time is spent mounting a NFS share and NetworkManager-Wait-online.

I don't fundamentally understand the question.

POST/EUFI has fundamentally taken the same amount of time, and has gotten a lot shorter since the days of 640K being enough for everyone. The difference between one board and another is largely negligible at a couple of seconds difference. I'd say it's probably less than 5 seconds on average, maybe 2-3 seconds to the beep, for anything I've owned in the past 20 years. That's perhaps faster than it used to be, due to the advent of SSDs.

The biggest improvement I'v

So, I believe that the majority of the pre-boot UEFI time is spent doing DDR training and PCIe training.

I've worked a bit on the RISC-V ecosystem. And while the CPU and motherboard are all open-source, there are two binary blobs left... the DDR training and the PCIe training. GigE and faster PHY might require training, too.

By training, I mean finding the speeds, offsets and parameters for these high speed and parallel links (even GigE is 4x 250 megabit). Much of this is highly proprietary and obviously hidden from normal view.

In the title, I say threadripper, so long (coincidentally, I just rebooted this vary machine I'm typing this on. The threadripper has PCIe training to do ... I believe with each card. There is also many memory modules of DDR.

I think the actual answer is 60 to 90 seconds.

But heck ... I've had servers that take over 5 minutes.

It's not about how fast code runs, it's about how long it takes the (increasingly long) chain of mboard subdevices to be fired up and report back (including precoded "give it a moment to stop ringing" pauses). The total time is the total amount the engineers think they can take before a manager twists tighter.

Roughly 20 seconds from hitting the power switch to the login screen. The desktop comes up within a second of typing in my password. 13th gen Core i9, 32GB RAM, Samsung 990 Pro. MSI hardware. Windows11.

Bootup seems to be faster when you shut off all boot options except for the Windows bootloader. I shut off as much diagnostic, peripheral searching, and legacy boot stuff as possible.

> "How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and "You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?"

I don't know, because all my machines have always been Linux only. My home Acer MB desktop with Ryzen takes about 6 seconds before it hits grub, then I am looking at a GUI login screen in about 5 more seconds. Of course, that machi

Not much progress since then.

Memory Characterization is a process that is done once and stored. On successful boot UEFI should save all it needs to get the system booting up within a second or two. It sounds very much like this complaint is a symptom of something gone wrong. Possible things to look at:

1. Check to see if your UEFI has a setting like "full boot" or "fast boot" or anything similar that is set incorrectly. On my Gigabyte motherboard it's called UEFI FastBoot and if this is disabled the UEFI process takes about 10 before the system even has a chance to get to the OS.

2. Check your RAM speed. Is your RAM speed the same you set in the UEFI config screen? If not you're failing RAM characterisation.

3a. Possibly not doable: Do you have an 8 seg display on your motherboard showing the boot step? Seeing the same numbers flash repeatedly is an indication that the boot process is failing and that is often due to a RAM or or video card problem.

3b. Try setting your RAM speed to it's base level, disable all XMP/DOCP/EXPO settings. Does the boot process speed up? If so it's a symptom that the boot process is failing.

My Windows machine is at the login screen in under 10 seconds from pressing the power button.

My Linux machine doesn't feel appreciably slower to the point that I've cared about it so probably sub 20 seconds to the login screen.

I haven't dual booted in a while, but it's possible that fastboot may not work on a motherboard if need to select a different boot drive. The problem isn't that modern systems are slow, it's that they are so fast that the user isn't given time to interact with them (I find it very difficult to get into the UEFI screen as the time between keyboard being active and process being handed over to the bootloader is insanely short).

5 seconds with fast boot enabled, then timeout for the boot menu is 5 seconds. after that less than 10 to a working X11 desktop. If you can't wait that long see a doctor.

But that's only every couple of months when it's time to reboot. Normal day is wake up from suspend to ram in 3 seconds ( actually it is less but it takes the monitor longer to wake and sync than for the desktop to wake up).

I had an old Tandy 1000HX with dos 3.11 (or was it 2.x) built into ROM. Boot time was about 2 seconds.

You don't know how good y'all have it. Back in my day you'd have to go outside in the snow and have to crank the power supply which if you did it wrong would take your arm clean off. Then you go in the house and feed dozens of paper punched cards into the computer which took 3 hours to boot and that's if you did it right .. God forbid you dropped the punch cards or put one in the wrong order. The whole thing would explode or blow a valve and then you'd have to go into the city hardware store to get replacem

I remember my Apple //c booting up in about five seconds, off a 5.25" floppy. I'll never forget the distinctive sound Apple DOS made when booting.

B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R.. chk-chk, chk, chhhhhhhhhk

(I used FaskDisk, which helped quite a bit with disk access speed by optimizing sector interleave)

Times were probably the worst on the Mac Classics, booting off their 2.5" discs could take 20-30 seconds before the desktop appeared, and another 20 seconds of really sluggish user interface while the rest of the bits load

I notice it taking longer more than I notice my computer's boot time.

Most of the boot time on my machine(s) is spent turning on the MB hardware and getting it configured. Generally that takes between 5 and 10 seconds, with the Z790 machines being on the high end and the older Z470 being on the low end. Once Linux gets control most of the time is spent on USB devices. Not sure on the Windows boxen because they don't show that info.

Is that a Windows thing?

Both my Linux desktops from 10+ years ago and my Mac desktops these days rarely ever boot. Why would they?

I mean yes, it's an interesting question. But its relevance is minimal, isn't it? If you run both Win and Linux, you are probably running one of them in a VM on top of the other, because just the hassle - why would you do that to yourself?

My CP/M 2.2 on a 10MHz Z180 boots in 5 seconds or so from power on, most of the time is spent on the rom checksums by romwbw hbios.

Does it really matter much? Just how often are people powering down / rebooting their computers nowadays anyway?

Most of my boot-up time these days is not spent by the PC but taken up my recently acquired Dell monitor getting confused by the screen resolution changes at startup. After BIOS's splash screen it goes grey, and then showing a message "No signal. Entering standby mode", thus obscuring the GRUB bootloader, delaying my view of it until it finds the signal again.

The monitor was supposed to be super fast, at 180 Hz, but ...

After I hit Return, I get to a Ubuntu Mate login prompt within 4 seconds.

It takes solid 10-15s to start booting - 64GB RAM with aggressive timings means much longer memory training, especially on AMD hardware. Then it almost immediately pauses to get disk encryption creds, which are getting thousands of rounds of hashing for 3-4 seconds before it can continue. At this point actual os booting starts and takes under 10s to login screen.

Then I bring coffee to bed, and further hibernate for 30 minutes.