Bootless Boot: Reducing Device Boot Latency with Byte Addressable NVRAM

Abstract

Booting is an essential process that loads an operating system (OS) to a main memory and initializes all the system. In this paper, we propose a new technique to shorten the boot-up time by using a non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM). This technique eliminates the kernel loading, the kernel decompression, and the reallocation of a kernel image by maintaining of the linux binary image at the non-volatile random access memory. The essence of locating OS binary image at NVRAM lies in how to re-initialize the segments that are updated as OS executes and have been initialized implicitly while OS is loaded onto memory from the storage device. We develop a Bootless Boot which completely removes the process of loading any of the kernel images. Bootless Boot consists of (i) object filter which identifies the kernel objects which need to be initialized every time OS boots up, (ii) explicit initialization module which explicitly re-initializes the objects identified by the object filter. Explicit initialization module is added to the linux kernel.