Intel’s power efficient budget processor Atom has conquered the netbook market and is expected to appear in many, many ultramobile systems over the coming years. Except from supplying the netbook market with the Atom hardware platform, Intel has also been responsible for the development of open source operating system Moblin. The operating system is an optimized version of Fedora Linux tailored for the Intel Atom platform. The project started in 2007 and it recently announced Moblin V2 Core Alpha that is based on the Linux 2.6.29 kernel.
Intel’s primary goal is to make an operating system that is superfast to boot and the goal is to do it in less than 5 second with a SSD-based system. This may sound impossible to do with a complete operating system, unlike SplashTop and similar, even though it is highly optimized, but it is actually nearly there.
Moblin V2 Core Alpha booting on SSD and HDD netbooks
Phoronix’ first tests of Moblin V2 Core Alpha registered a boot time of 13 seconds with Boot chart, but that includes the load time for bootchart, which takes a couple of seconds. Phoronix estimated that the boot time was really between 7-8 seconds on a Samsung NC10 netbook with an OCZ Core V2 SSD. The same computer took 36 seconds to launch a fresh install of Fedora 10, while Ubuntu 8.10 took 30 seconds.
Intel’s Moblin project looks real exciting and we will be following the development of the project that looks to change the netbook market.
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