Top all-time · #11569
Himesh's Blog
Personal blog · himeshp.blogspot.comhardwareprogramming
Himesh's Blog is a personal blog at himeshp.blogspot.com about hardware and programming. Since 2020, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog as a reference for speeding up Raspberry Pi boot times, covering ways to disable subsystems and the network wait. One commenter used its ideas for a fast-booting photo frame.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Stuff you may find interesting
Most-linked posts?
- /2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry-pi.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-05-19
- /2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry-pi.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-04-19
What Hacker News says?
Two other good articles on decreasing Pi boot times are: - https://www.furkantokac.com/rpi3-fast-boot-less-than-2-secon... - http://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry... I used these two to make a digital photo frame with a Pi that boots very quickly to a browser in kiosk mode. If you have very minimal requirements, you can get some very impressive boot times.
Comment linking /2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry-pi.html
on “Extreme Pi Boot Optimization”A few years ago, there was an article on getting a fully functional Linux booted on an rpi in 3-4s which has a few other, maybe more generally useful tips for speeding up startup times: http://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry...
Comment linking /2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry-pi.html
on “Raspberry Pi 3 Fastboot – Less Than 2 Seconds”Boot times of 3-4 seconds are achievable with a customized buildroot [1] [2] if you don’t need network, USB, HDMI, and other services. [1] https://mitxela.com/projects/thermal_paper_polaroid [2] https://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberr...
Comment linking /2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry-pi.html
on “DIY Camera Using Raspberry Pi”Quick googling found this: http://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry... Apparently rpi spends about as long on vc boot as it does for kernel+userland combined... Not great imho
Comment linking /2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry-pi.html
on “Commander X16”This isn't really relevant to booting Linux faster because it's about bare-metal programming a toy operating system. More of a learning tutorial than a practical replacement for standard Linux. There are plenty of guides for speeding up Raspberry Pi Linux boot: http://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry... If you're developing a true embedded product then you'll be making a customized Linux distrib…
Comment linking /2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry-pi.html
on “Operating System Development Tutorials in Rust on the Raspberry Pi”You can make a Pi boot much faster than that. The main thing to disable is wait for network available. Other embedded boards I've used eg Rock960 are ssh-able within about 20 seconds or less. Edit - much much faster (4 secs), actually: http://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry...
Comment linking /2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry-pi.html?m=1
on “Building a Raspberry Pi GPS Speedometer”There have been attempts to make the Pi boot faster (by disabling the initialization of various subsystems), e.g.: https://github.com/IronOxidizer/instant-pi https://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberr... https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2024/09/01/extreme-pi-boot-optimi... (previously featured here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420597 )
Comment linking /2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberry-pi.html
on “Optocam Zero: a Pi Zero based digital camera made using off the shelf components”