5 sec boot

[Mitch Bradley]

NoiseEHC wrote:
>
>> To what end?  AFAIK the zlib decompression (both in OFW and in the 
>> OS) is not one of the primary problem areas.
>>
> Changing fs read from CPU bound to IO bound would change a lot of 
> things, for example the boot could utilize a little bit of more 
> concurrency. Unfortunately we will only see its effect when the code 
> is written (or we will see that it does not help). It is not a problem 
> area but first there are projects which would gain on this speed (like 
> etoys loading AFAIK), and second every speed optimization (like boot 
> time and activity launch time) should take into consideration the 
> faster reading speed (which is theoretical at this point).
> See, I am NOT suggesting that you should waste time on these 
> "nonproblems" but I am not a Linux programming expert so I simply 
> cannot help you at this time (finishing 8.2.0) so I spend my 
> (currently not existing) time on these "nonproblem" projects.
>>> Where is that Security hash's code?
>> The computation code is at http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=bios-crypto .  
>> It is based on LibTomCrypt.
>>
>> The specific hashes and signatures that we use are detailed in the 
>> "Computation" column of 
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firmware_security#Summary
>>
>> The security computation code has undergone an audit by outside 
>> security experts.  Any changes to the core code would require an 
>> additional audit.
>>
> Exactly which algorithm does the firmware use and how much data does 
> it hash? Just out of curiosity...
>
The algorithms are as specified in the wiki reference.  The hashed data 
includes the kernel and the initrd, about 4 megabytes total. You can get 
the exact numbers for a given OS release by looking at the sizes of 
/boot/ros.zip and /boot/rd.zip