Optimizing Screen Startup Times

Updated: April 19, 2023

This chapter describes strategies and techniques that you can use to reduce the time between when you power on and when Screen is ready on your system.

The time to boot is dependent upon the design and implementation of your system, so the sections in this chapter describe general techniques instead of concrete steps to optimize your system.

Screen supports systems with or without displays, and systems with or without a GPU. For these systems, optimization opportunities are mostly in the areas of starting up your base system (IPL, kernel, Core OS) and Screen. There are more optimization techniques for your applications if your system supports graphics and displays. This guide describes many different possible optimization techniques. Use the techniques that are applicable to your system.

In this chapter, we refer to:
  • content, as a static image or a video
  • splash screen application (or splash_screen_application in the examples) as the program, which you create to show content on the display. A splash screen application can use both the GPU and displays that are supported by your system. Typically, for an optimized startup time, we recommend that splash screen applications avoid using the GPU.
Note: It's important to note that the actual time saved (typically in the order of milliseconds) varies between hardware platforms. As the system architect or developer, you should implement the optimization techniques that meet the requirements for your system.

Some hardware platforms aren't functional until all the necessary device drivers are started. For those platforms, you won't be able to take advantage of all the techniques described in this guide to optimize the startup time. Some of the techniques described in this guide are targeted for hardware platforms that permit you to start device drives as required, rather than requiring that all device drivers are started before any applications can run.