> Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more…<p>I don't think that's correct. While the optimized sorting algorithm is 100x times faster than the old sorting algorithm, it was only a small part of the boot process (2ms), so the boot speed up is only 7%.
If you fired a bullet at 450m/s at a FreeBSD machine sitting 50 feet away, it would have enough time to boot up and perform operations before being struck and destroyed by the bullet.
> I believe Linux is at 75-80 ms for the same environment where I have FreeBSD booting in 25 ms.<p>From the article, Colin Percival on how Linux does as well. Impressive (though would be good to see other benchmarks to corroborate Colin's).<p>(Which is an HN comment actually: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37205578">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37205578</a>.)
That's good. FreeBSD was pretty damn fast already, even on old hardware.<p>But in the cloud it still takes several more seconds more seconds to download the container full of 200 megs of javascript shite from the local docker repo and fire it up before being able to service requests...
Having a tough time understanding the impacts of this work. Fast boot times matter if you boot often. So what’s the use case here?<p>Hmm, actually I’m not sure I even understand the whole “serverless” thing that much to be honest.<p>Running FreeBSD as if it’s a “process” on Linux is interesting in a way but - who does this?
Seems to be a summary/rehash of <a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/freebsd-firecracker" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/freebsd-fire...</a> - which I guess came first, and is a better article.
The headline has got a lot of asterisks. On a server that's already running, they can open a new software-only VM in 25ms. So it's more like saying they launch a new application in 25ms. It still sounds great though.
First line of article: <i>Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more</i><p>This is obviously not true.