5 sec boot

[Mitch Bradley]

david at lang.hm wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Oct 2008, Mitch Bradley wrote:
>
>> ...
>
> since the XO hardware is fixed, why would you ship a kernel that used 
> modules for any of the XO hardware? especially for anything that it 
> needs at boot time?

By and large, the required drivers are not modules.  It's possible that 
we might have screwed up in some cases, but I think we've done the right 
thing for the most part.

The built-in wireless device is on USB.

>
> if you don't need modules to boot, why do you need initrd? you should 
> be able to just do everything from the main partition.

Our activation security system is in an initrd so that the firmware can 
check its signature before booting it.  The whole security thing adds a 
bunch of interesting wrinkles.

>
> neither of these require any changes to the Fedora stuff (I do this on 
> every system that I run, have done so with many different distros, and 
> never run into problems)
>
> remember that you can still have modules for USB devices, but not need 
> to use any of them at boot time (if there are no USB devices plugged in)

As mentioned, our wireless module is on an internal USB port.  To what 
extent does that complicate the situation?

>
> David Lang