Energi Technical Marketing

MontaVista Fast Boot is a Linux technology that allows engineers to instantly display real world critical data on screen in 1 second or less.

Why it is that so important? Because it is an imperative in most safety critical applications mainly found in Automotive, Industrial or Mil/Aero domains to have your vital system data available to the user instantly after the system is powered. It could be engine check or gear info in a car, temperature and pressure readings for power plant or sonar data on a plane.It means that you have appropriate interfaces enabled and functional within 1 second, and be able to supply real data to update your graphics within 1 second. For example this could be drivers like CAN/MOST bus for automotive or ARINC/MIL1533 in the aerospace case.

Technically it is available as a config option with most of code designed to be architecturally independent, however proper use of Fast Boot requires an intimate knowledge of CPU architecture to be able to utilize benefits of this approach. We would recommend our customers to talk to our Professional Services group to discuss their requirements and how we can assist in achieving their fast boot requirements.

Fast Boot design architecture leverages many man-years of embedded expertise accumulated by MontaVista and relies on certain techniques and optimization technologies. In a nutshell we heavily optimize the boot process starting with the bootloader, execute early graphics initialization in parallel with Linux kernel and exploit certain CPU features like simultaneous DMA transfers.

There are also advantages of Fast Boot versus standard suspend/resume approach. While suspend/resume is perfectly acceptable for CE devices, most Industrial or Automotive applications cannot be battery backed regardless of suspend mode because of very tight power budget or temperature range/weight/size requirements. In this case you have no choice other than to be operational instantly after a cold boot.

MontaVista Fast Boot will be demonstrated running on a Freescale ADS5121e PowerPC CPU board at Embedded Masterclass.