Microsoft is Speeding Up Xbox Boot Times (theverge.com) 47
Microsoft is speeding up the boot time of its Xbox consoles. In the latest Xbox Insider test builds of the Xbox dashboard, the cold boot startup time has been reduced by around 5 seconds for Xbox Series X / S consoles. Microsoft was able to speed up the boot sequence by creating a shorter bootup animation. From a report: Xbox testers noticed a faster bootup time recently, and Microsoft confirmed the changes on Friday. Josh Munsee, director of Xbox integrated marketing, says the company created "a shorter boot up animation (~4s) from the original boot up animation (~9s), helping to reduce the overall startup time." The changes aren't limited to Xbox Series X / S consoles, either. "Xbox One generation consoles are booting noticeably faster with these changes," explains Jake Rosenberg, senior product manager lead at Xbox.
I could speed it up by a further 4s (Score:4, Funny)
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Seriously. Boot up animations are dumb. We know what machine we're turning on.
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Still less dumb than adding the fucking company logo on light switches. Who's that supposed to be for? I've already bought the damn things, do they think visitors will see company-branded switches and replace the switches they already have at their house? Fucking marketing department always ruining everything.
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Re:I could speed it up by a further 4s (Score:5, Interesting)
That may be true, but users don't necessarily know.
You power on the device - you should display something relatively quickly to give feedback to the user "you turned me on". Otherwise users are apt to flip the power switch a few times and do other things that might accidentally turn it off again, then your device ends up in the return pile as "non working" even though it's perfectly functional - the user just didn't wait long enough.
There should also be signs of progress. You might turn on an LED immediately when the power button is pressed to tell the user something is happening, but if the boot takes a while, you need to show something else is happening - an animation or a sound to show it's actually getting itself ready, else a user might thing it crashed on startup, turns it off, and tries it again. This should typically happen within about 3-4 seconds of the power button being pressed - just to indicate yes, it's actually doing something.
Then during the bulk part of booting up, you need to show the user that things are happening, usually an animation or something - some sort of visual indication that the system is busy and doing stuff and not crashed.
Typically it's something like the bootloader can turn on the LED - it's just boot code and a simple GPIO. The bootloader loads the OS kernel, and the OS kernel throws up a static image while it initializes the base OS and drivers. Then the kernel passes control to userspace, where high level functions are now available, so while userspace initializes, it can throw up an animation.
Users hate when they do something and there's no feedback - the device is still dead and black and nothing seems to be happening. After about 5-10 seconds, they assume what they did didn't work, so they'll try again, or try other things and play around with it to try to get it to do *something*. And in doing so it can interrupt the startup process and get it into modes it's not supposed to, or the user might accidentally turn it back off again.
So things like this are needed, and often a boot animation is used to hide the fact that the system is still starting up by providing the necessary feedback that things are happening.
So it's not necessarily true that eliminating the boot animation speeds up the boot - it might slightly quicken it because the system doesn't have to do the effort of playing the animation, but in general, telling the user to get ready is a good idea.
Of course, the best is a progress bar, but you usually want an animation to show it's still doing something.
And no, if the boot time is going to be lengthy, you need to do something to change things to show something has happened - perhaps they walked away and it still has to take 5-10 minutes to boot but the progress bar is barely moving - then you need to tell the user things are still happening else they will thing it soft-locked.
A really good example of bad feedback is an early TiVo - you plug it in, and the lights light up, showing it's got power, but the TV won't show anything for another 30 seconds or so while it loads the kernel and boots it. It then will show a static screen and stay there for 5 or more minutes (while the kernel initializes), at which point you can keep waiting, and hopefully it transitions to a second screen (userspace) but this can take another 5-10 minutes and you're not really sure if it's locked up or failed. When it's finally complete, you then have to sit through the animation which is played after the system is ready.
But long periods of not seeing anything happening is a really bad thing as users are never sure if something went wrong.
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You power on the device - you should display something relatively quickly to give feedback to the user "you turned me on". Otherwise users are apt to flip the power switch a few times
Indeed. Watched a youtuber repeatedly power cycle an amiga because it would only display a gray screen when I knew that that particular model had a very long startup when a hard drive wasn't connected. He could have saved himself a whole lot of needless trial and error if he had either googled the information or commodore had put a "checking boot devices" notice onscreen.
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That may be true, but users don't necessarily know.
You power on the device - you should display something relatively quickly to give feedback to the user "you turned me on". Otherwise users are apt to flip the power switch a few times and do other things that might accidentally turn it off again, then your device ends up in the return pile as "non working" even though it's perfectly functional - the user just didn't wait long enough.
I mean, sure, I get your argument, but the general state of the art these days is that turning on your console and TV and soundbar and everything is a many-second series of pauses of waiting for each device to come up and sync with the other devices, even if you have a one-button solution. A big part of the problem is that developers of devices either don't care about startup time or simply aren't competent to improve startup time.
Microsoft IS competent to get this stuff right, but even if they're perfect
Re: I could speed it up by a further 4s (Score:2)
Usually boot animations are there to make the user perceive less time passing while the actual work goes on in the background. Iâ(TM)m sure the shortening of the animation is only there because they actually optimised the boot process too.
Re: I could speed it up by a further 4s (Score:2)
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The animations are ok, as long as they allow bootup to continue in the background. I know products where the boot or startup messages and logs are there in order to hide the lengthy boot process happening behind the scenes. It is handy to have some picture or message, just so that you know it's turned on and booting and you don't try to push the power or reset button. But having an animation that pauses the boot up while everythign else is paused is completely idle is dumb, that's just stupid advertising
Re:I could speed it up by a further 4s (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes... and no.
Boot animations are usually running independent of the boot process itself. If anything, it could shave another 0.01 seconds off the boot time, we're talking about a contemporary computer after all, that's not really something anyone would notice. But you notice that there is an animation going on, so you know the console is booting.
If we're talking about an animation that runs while the console is pretty much in a wait state, I absolutely agree, but the average "load screen" these days happens in a separate thread that runs independently of the actual boot sequence. In other words, I doubt that these 4 seconds are actually just spent displaying that boot sequence. There is a lot of crap going on behind the scenes while you're watching some funny logos jump about the screen.
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systemd comes to xbox (Score:1)
Removed a sleep() 50% speedup! (Score:1)
I'm not sure they should get much credit here for removing, or rather reducing, what amounts to a sleep(4) from a sleep(9) call. I guess that's classic Microsoft for you. Here's the speedup you've always wanted! Man if they just took away that animation, it could be EVEN FASTER!!!!
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Do you really think that's all that they did here, or are you just pretending to think that, so you can take a dig at Microsoft?
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But the sentiment is correct. This is a non story.
Before everyone enrages with the animation time... (Score:5, Informative)
It’s the other way around, boot time was improved so the animation was shortened to match. Source [twitter.com].
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Oh, thank you for this.
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This makes sense.
Non issue (Score:2)
IOW, it takes me 2-3 minutes from the time I decide I want to play a game until I can play a game.
YMMV of course, but I bet I speak for the majority of us basement dwellers.
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switch to the HDMI port my PS4 is on
Any reason you don't use HDMI-CEC to auto switch to the PS4 HDMI input?
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HDMI-CEC is a big pain in the ass with multiple sources. Inputs jump around, stuff turns other stuff off and on... yuck.
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My PC was similar. Turn it on, go use the restroom, come back, start up the game, hit esc-esc-esc-esc, play game. Long wait. Then the fast Windows 8/10 hibernate feature showed up and I used that, and also disabled the game's logo videos, so now my routine is: turn it on, stand up, sit down again because the screen is on, start the gam which is now ready in seconds, play the game for 10 minutes then realize I *really* need to use the restroom...
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You can just use normal hibernate to get machine to boot up even faster, unless you're running a very large RAM machine.
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I have a PS4. I typically turn it on when I get up to get a beer and a snack, then after 30-60 seconds settle into the inviting arms of my La-Z-Boy with a freshly charged controller. My cat jumps into my lap while I'm telling my TV to switch to the HDMI port my PS4 is on, then adjust the cat so both hands are free.
That's a helluva lot of work. I just press the PS button on my PS5's controller, it turns on the PS5, the TV, my receiver, and switches the receiver to the PS5's HDMI source. HDMI CEC is a wonderful piece of protocol (when it works right).
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Been long enough since I set it up that I flat out don't remember the details, but my Playstation devices have ignored/not passed off messages for a long while. Not sure if it's a glitch or intentional, but my LG TV seems to be the master, without the PS turning it off, but with it turning on the LG TV which seems to turn on the Onkyo Receiver. Same with my Switch.
Remember the good ol' days? (Score:5, Funny)
When you plug a cart into your console, you flipped the switch and it was just THERE?
Today, you turn on your console. If it doesn't RROD or whatever the current equivalent is, you may insert the medium. Then it downloads some update. Then it asks you for some information you HAVE TO provide to "personalize" the game. Then you upload god knows what to god knows what server. Then you get to watch a few cutscenes. Preferably unskipable ones. Then you download some more patches.
No later than then, the whole thing crashes and you start over.
By the time you can finally play the damn game, you simply don't care about it anymore.
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I'm not done yelling at Azure and AWS!
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You kids with your six-digit IDs. . . .
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I agree! Freeze everything in time. The moment it rolls off the line it should be in the state it will forever be. Ditto for the games. Don't alter one byte, please. No additional content, no fixes. If it wasn't on the pressed physical media, it shouldn't come near my perfect, unalterable console. That media, by the way, better be perfect. No releasing imperfect code, ever.
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Why do I have the feeling you are sarcastic here? I would say exactly that. Just unironically so.
Today, what is released is what we used to call "bananaware". It matures while it's at the customer already. Just like bananas, who are delivered green and only ripen and mature after they've long been delivered. You, customer, get an unfinished product. It's crappy, buggy and more often than not half-finished. Even if we don't plan to sell you a 0-day DLC to squeeze some more money out of you to finally get a g
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I was being a jackass, that's why. No other defensible reason exists.
Putting the serious hat back on, old consoles could be "relatively" bug free because their ROMs were limited to 1MB (NES) down to 4KB (Atari). Even then, there will still bugs. Now games are millions of lines of code.
https://www.cnet.com/home/smar... [cnet.com]
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Old console games were bug free (well, mostly) because there was no way to patch them post-release. These things were tested and retested over and over and over, and that was also the reason why those "secret" passcodes were still in the release version, you know the things, that allowed you to skip levels and get unlimited health, because that was required to test the game thoroughly, and removing it from the final product meant risking breaking something.
These things were debugged and actually finished.
Ye
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When a solo developer handles the entire engine from top to bottom they can know or at least have a pretty good idea of what's going on and what's going to happen with every line of 6502 ASM they add. Once you start abstracting away the hardware and adding more programmers it all goes out the window. Now the bugs may not even be your bugs, you have to constantly wonder if the stated operation of the middleware library you are using is actually the reality, whether you're providing bad data to Vulkan or whet
Wasn't the white X on black sponsored by Samsung? (Score:2)
Does this matter to anybody? (Score:1)
I get it. Multiply 5 seconds times millions of consoles, times (dozens?) cold restarts per console, and you save oceans of time.
But who cares? Honestly? Are those 5 seconds returned to the world as productive moments, bettering humanity?
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. But it's not newsworthy.
Yet Windows Boottimes Rot (Score:2)
Using patented Microsoft Technology (Score:1)
When the delay loop is calibrated by the version number (as in: for(x=1; x (100000 - version*100); x++) sleep(1);) it is pretty easy to make each new version "faster" than the previous version.
SSD to the rescue (Score:2)
I remember the Windows Vista times, which coincide with the 7th gen consoles (360, PS3) which also came with a hard drive.
The boot times were atrocious. It took about 30 seconds to see "the desktop" sorry games top? Anyway, and even then it was not completely done. Next generation (PS4, One) was not much better.
But finally getting an SSD as standard made a huge difference. I actually also replaced the drives on my older systems with an SSD, too, but they had SATA2, not nvme.
Anyway, things are finally back t