[OLPC-devel] NAND/JFFS2 support for Filo?

[Ronald G Minnich]

Goodrich,Steven wrote:
> Caveat: I'm new to Linux.
>  
> Out of curiosity (and a desire to save space in the BIOS ROM): I 
> understand that LinuxBIOS will load a tiny Linux kernel from the ROM, 
> which in turn will load the full Linux OS from the NAND flash.  That 
> seems a rather lengthy process to me.  

it's not.

I've done the measurements. There is a lot of work put into linux for 
high performance I/O. In general, a full linux kernel will boot a target 
OS more quickly than any polling-io driven bootstrap such as FILO and/or 
etherboot. Linux will run the file system faster, and do the I/O far 
more intelligently.

We can go FILO if you want, but boot-time performance is not a good 
reason. Also, we'll lose the ability to load over wireless over USB, and 
that would be a shame. I don't want to put a USB stack into filo ... usb 
is a nightmare.

ron