[gsliepen]

I've seen wildly varying start up times on x86 hardware. I had an Samsung Ativ Book 9+ running stock Debian that with a cold start had fully started X and showed the login prompt before the backlight turned on (about 1 second). I've also had the "pleasure" to manage some Dell servers that took an impressive 2 minutes just to get past the BIOS.

(Well I did turn off the 5 second delay in GRUB to make that laptop boot time possible.)

[close04]

The reason it varies wildly is that the hardware and possible settings supported varies wildly on a DIY PC. A few things I noticed a few years ago while troubleshooting slow POST:

- Having a HDD connected to the additional SATA ports provided by an onboard controller (not the chipset) incurred a delay because the controller was initialized later (slower?), the HDD would power up later, and the POST sequence wouldn't finish until the HDD finished spinning up. Checking SMART on boot just made it worse.

- Switching between the 2 GPUs I had available at the time (one Nvidia, one AMD) consistently made a couple of seconds of difference.

- Using XMP made POST much slower too (don't remember by how much).

- Updating the FW on my SSD shaved a bit of time.

- Devices connected to USB during post also increased POST time.

And as a side note, my cheaper, simpler mobos would always POST faster. Gaming/OC mobos these days are loaded and it all adds up to what the PC has to do to initialize in POST.

Bottom line is it's easier to optimize for short POST when your config is locked in place (like a phone) then on a machine that could have any number of possible permutations of hardware and settings. Today that's x86.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> some Dell servers that took an impressive 2 minutes just to get past the BIOS.

I'm pretty sure I've seen worse, but in fairness you can only check 1T of RAM so fast:) (These were monster database servers.)