>>>> Maybe you never shutdown, but some, like me, prefer to put their
>>>> laptop back in a well-know state from time to time.
>>> Indeed, I do reboot from time to time. Sometimes it's because I
>>> didn't keep an eye on battery state - it's getting towards the end of
>>> it's life and I can no longer rely on the "low battery warning,
>>> followed a while later by a forced sleep and suspend to disk" that
>>> happens with a healthy battery. More often it's to clear memory -
>>> something seems to have a leak, and I'm not that convinced OS X
>>> memory management is all that good.  But normally, I just use sleep
>>> mode.
>>      When I was testing a static build of vdev, I used to reboot my
>> laptop several times per hour, alternatively to Debian Wheezy and to a
>> minimalistic OS on a USB stick, containing essentially vdev and
>> busybox. Reboot time is around 30s, yet it's still irritating.

>>      Bios + Grub + kernel startup take by far the biggest part, but I
>> think there's room for progress on these.
> "To a degree": The three things wich take longest when booting my
> workstation are

>     - boot the kernel
>          - get an address via DHCP
>          - set the time via NTP