Booting Linux quickly is highly desirable for embedded devices, particularly those that are battery-powered or require high availability. A common approach for reducing boot times with minimal effort is to remove unused features, effectively turning a general purpose operating system into a specialised one. However, this compromise of sacrificing features for boot time reduces flexibility …
Category: Boot Time Optimisation
The Impact of Non-Blocking Consoles (nbcon) on Linux Boot Time
During the Linux boot process, the boot console is responsible for relaying boot messages to the user. On embedded systems this console is often attached to a serial port that can only handle a maximum data rate of a few kilobytes per second which degrades overall boot time. In this post we’ll explore how the …
2 Second Linux Boot on i.MX8
Earlier this year we we wrote a blog post that looked at the steps required to enable hardware accelerated image classification on an i.MX8 based Coral Dev Board. We created a Linux ‘Tux mascot detector’ that was able to detect if an object placed in front of a camera was the Tux mascot or something …
Edge AI: Image Classification on a Coral Dev Board
There are many benefits in moving artificial intelligence from the cloud to the local device – these include improvements to privacy, security, speed and reliability. However, device local AI (Edge AI and Endpoint AI) has only become possible thanks to improvements in both the computing abilities of embedded devices and improvements in the field of …
Reducing Boot Time with systemd
It’s no surprise that systemd has become the init system of choice for both embedded and desktop Linux distributions – it’s modern, packed full of features and is able to replace an ever increasing number of ancient utilities and daemons. When compared to it’s predecessor (SysVinit) – it also provides a much greater scope for …