BB: booting booster for consumer electronics with modern OS

Abstract

Unconventional computing platforms have spread widely and rapidly following smart phones and tablets: consumer electronics such as smart TVs and digital cameras. For such devices, fast booting is a critical requirement; waiting tens of seconds for a TV or a camera to boot up is not acceptable, unlike a PC or smart phone. Moreover, the software platforms of these devices have become as rich as conventional computing devices to provide comparable services. As a result, the booting procedure to start every required OS service, hardware component, and application, the quantity of which is ever increasing, may take unbearable time for most consumers. To accelerate booting, this paper introduces Booting Booster (BB), which is used in all 2015 Samsung Smart TV models, and which runs the Linux-based Tizen OS. BB addresses the init scheme of Linux, which launches initial user-space OS services and applications and manages the life cycles of all user processes, by identifying and isolating booting-critical tasks, deferring non-critical tasks, and enabling execution of more tasks in parallel. BB has been successfully deployed in Samsung Smart TV 2015 models achieving a cold boot in 3.5 s (compared to 8.1 s with full commercial-grade optimizations without BB) without the need for suspend-to-RAM or hibernation. After this successful deployment, we have released the source code via http://opensource.samsung.com/, and BB will be included in the open-source OS, Tizen (http://tizen.org/).