Early boot, activation, upgrades

[Mitch Bradley]

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On 7/9/07, Mitch Bradley <wmb at laptop.org> wrote:
>> At that 3M size, I'm beginning to have second thoughts about the "one
>> initrd for both activation and normal booting" idea.  A busybox
>> (statically linked with uclibc) with enough trimmings to do darn near
>> anything compresses to about 0.6 MB.  The fact that the kernel can
>> currently boot with no initrd at all makes it hard for me to swallow the
>> proposition of tripling the load image size in the usual case.
>
> I'll look into how small I can make it tomorrow.  If we've got to have
> the initrd for activation, we might as well do normal boot with it,
> since the time spent decompressing is still minimal for the sizes
> we're talking about.  I can try to quantify that claim once I get my
> B4. ;-)
> --scott
>
Decompression is fast, but the signature verification is not so fast, 
especially since there are several different algorithms.