I deleted the message accidentally, but somebody was asking about
booting Linux more quickly.
We found a number of ways to do that. It's not always obvious, but
booting from a ramdrive filesystem is much faster than booting from a
hard drive, so we set this up on an embedded device. Next, we removed
almost everything from the boot scripts. We used mingetty instead of
agetty to make the getty process smaller, and only have one running.
All these things together helped tremendously.
Then we looked at the kernel. We wanted to stop short of 'hacking' the
kernel, but as it turns out, this isn't really necessary. We removed so
many device drivers (including the floppy drive) that when we were done,
the kernel was half its usual size, and booted very quickly (no devices
to scan, which was taking the most boot time).
All in all, we have a P-166 with 32MB RAM and a 4MB flash disk booting
in around 5 seconds. I'm sure this could be reduced - our application
required audio and networking support.
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Chad Robinson http://www.brt.com/ Senior Systems
Analyst
[EMAIL PROTECTED] BRT
Technologies, Inc.
