5 sec boot

[Deepak Saxena]

On Oct 04 2008, at 16:32, Mitch Bradley was caught saying:
>> We can probably just get away with making all of /boot into a
>> romfs; however, do we even need to bother with a filesystem  
>> representation of the images?  We could have four partions (kernel0, 
>> kernel1, initrd0, initrd1) that contain the binary data for current and 
>> alternate images and some sort of way
>> to tell which one is current and which one is alternate.
>>
>> ~Deepak
>>
>>   
> I have considered something like that off and on.  It's sort of nice to  
> have a definite length for the images.  There are ways around that, but  
> they are a bit ugly at some level.  It's sort of a tossup at some level.
>
> One difficultly with having a lot of partitions is that it makes it more  
> likely that you will encounter the resizing issue.

+1. I'm also thinking that romfs overhead is minimal enough that it is not
going to hurt boottime.

> On a related topic, I would like to see us start bundling the initrd  
> into the kernel image.  It's certainly possible to do that with existing  
> kernel mechanisms.  The two pieces are interdependent enough that they  
> really have to be updated together, at which point it's really better to  
> have them in the same image.

This is on the packaging todo list; however, if we move to a non-module 
kernel, then the initramfs contents will be completely independent of 
the kernel build so we may want to just keep them as separate packages?

~Deepak

-- 
Deepak Saxena - Kernel Developer - dsaxena at laptop.org