Feedback on BTest-1 Unit

[Chris Ball]

>> On Sat, 02 Dec 2006 11:48:27, <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> said:

   >> - bootup is not speedy. Any chance of using upstart?

   > I spoke to Scott at UDS-MTV a bit back about this. I expect we'll
   > go in that approximate direction, yes.

We're in the superb position of already knowing what hardware's present,
which makes a lot of what the kernel does at boot redundant.  A few of
us (David Zeuthen, Chris Blizzard and I) chatted about extremely fast
startup at Red Hat on Thursday -- can anyone think of issues with
storing a copy of RAM at the point where the kernel finishes booting 
and using that straight away at next boot, having Open Firmware read
it from the NAND?

Mitch points out that jffs2 takes a few seconds to mount, so we might
partition the NAND, and use FAT for a small partition with this memory
dump in.  Our startup time could drop to just a few seconds, and we
could compress the RAM image.

Has anyone worked on anything like this before?  Any pointers?

Thanks!

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>