[LinuxBIOS] Rapid booting of Linux -- Recommended distributions / Kernel options?

[Peter Stuge]

On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 09:33:36AM -0700, Eric Poulsen wrote:
> Can anyone recommend any distributions that are more geared towards
> the embedded rapid-boot?

Besides rolling your own bare-minimum distribution perhaps GNAP would
fit:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/gnap.xml

(Gentoo Network Appliance)

The system footprint seems to be around 15MB, don't know about boot
times.


For my soekris boxes (which btw are Geode SC1100s just begging for
LinuxBIOS, they have serial, ethernet(s!), various expansion
possibilities, no VGA, no sound and a proprietary BIOS :) I used the
Gentoo catalyst tool to make a stage4 glibc-based system in about
38MB (including quite a lot of tools) but beware that it's a bit
messy since you have to list all files from packages that you don't
want in the end result (man pages, other docs, development stuff etc)
 - on the other hand you can create local packages in the portage
overlay directory to customize the system and boot process
completely. I haven't optimized for speed at all so boot takes about
80 seconds. Maybe ten seconds from power on until init exec, so
there's a lot of room for improvement.

Some Gentooers frown upon making a stage4 for an embedded system but
I found that doing so simply allows me more choice than GNAP would.


//Peter