I'm guessing your Retina Display MacBook Pro boots from an SSD. SSD's are insanely good (compared to spinning disks) at random, concurrent access, as happens during boot. Even my Windows system boots pretty quickly these days thanks to the SSD…. and my OSX on a spinning disk is relatively slow to start up. launchd is also pretty neat, it allows concurrent start up of daemons (is linux start up still controlled via scripts and sequential? Its been a while since I've had anything to do with linux), and also on-demand start up, which pushes the startup off until the daemon is required. And, if we are comparing with OSX 10.0, the kernel is much much better. Gone are the days of giant kernel locks. So… its a bit of both. SSDs make a huge difference, and the OS has improved as well. Nick On 21/05/2013, at 7:03 AM, Michael Crawford wrote:
I've been running Mac OS X since 10.0. I even used it on a Power Macintosh 8500, that OS X directly from Apple didn't support, but that would work if you installed some drivers that some developer cooked up for the older hardware.
OS X ran OK on my 8500, but was so slow as to be unusable. It was a crushing disappointment, as at the time I didn't have the cash for a new box.
Older releases of Mac OS X showed a progress bar during boot, with messages that reported what step was taking place.
My 10.8.3 Retina Display MacBook Pro shows the circular progress indicator for five or ten seconds - I think mostly to run a memory test - then the screen changes color, and I'm presented with my password prompt just a second or two later.
I'm having a hard time figuring out how OS X can boot so fast. It's not just the kernel initialization, there are a lot of demons to start, the display server and so on.
We have the Kernel Extension cache, but there must be a lot more to it. This speed can't be explained just by the faster CPU.
Try booting your Mac off of Windows or Linux. There is no comparison.
Curiously,
Mike -- Michael David Crawford mdcrawford at gmail dot com
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