hibernate / fastboot

Ratte

Are there any considerations to speed up the startup time, especially on the RaspberryPi?
What I could imagine would be a kind of "hibernate" which boots directly into emustation. If I use the menu to update the game list, this feature could simultaneously create a new "hibernate" image. To optimize the load time it would be helpful to compress the image. When the image is loaded, the unpacking process would allow the CPU to effectively increase the throughput rate compared to a raw image. For this I could imagine that before the creation of the new "snapshot" the memory is cleaned (NULL) and then a classical Reboot is executed. I would generate the new image with the start of the es-surface. The previous memory clear would allow a high compaction and the image would be loaded very quickly by sdcard. This is just an idea, the rpi boots very slowly.

nadenislamarre

lol "very quickly by sdcard"
it boots in 10' for me, but i guess that you have a lot of games. es is not yet optimized for this.

chris256

Hello nadenislamarre . Maybe adding the option to launch ES with option --gamelist-only would improve launch time with long gamelists. The option is described in this page:
https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera-emulationstation/blob/master/GAMELISTS.md

nadenislamarre

more seriously, hibernate means save the memory on the sdcard. it should take a very long time on an sdcard.

Ratte

Thats why i wrote about synchron-(de)compression during loading or saving.
I wrote about the rpi0 boot time, it is far away from fast, no games installed only the fresh Image.
The rpi3 is much faster, but i think it is worth to do some research in this direction.
A nearly instand on could be a big benefit against the competitiors.

How much memory is really used at the point where ES apears?
100MB ?!