On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 3:37 PM, joem joem@martindale-electric.co.uk wrote:
Debian boots in 0.87 seconds:
... not quite. they say it boots to a busybox shell in 0.87 seconds, and they can *supply* debian wheezy for it. they most likely boot direct rather than use u-boot. or if they use u-boot it's also been configured to minimal settings.
http://linuxgizmos.com/headless-arm9-sbc-boots-linux-in-less-than-one-second... http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7250-V2
Good if this could be force marched to happen EOMA / Allwinner CPU.
A complete world game changer and a lot of funds will get released for dormant projects that need fast boot + linux.
it's doable - it's quite a committment in time and effort which i'd prefer (personally) to see an advance financial committment matched to it.
to get any OS (such as debian) to boot very very fast you need to make some quite significant modifications. udev has to go (entirely) in favour of a static set of /dev/* entries, for example. the kernel has to be customised to minimise the number of extra pseudo ttys. initrd has to go: everything must be in a static monstrously-large kernel (which itself becomes problematic as that adversely affects load time).
so it's a balancing act that has already moved outside of the mainstream debian (or other OS) infrastructure and purpose, that then needs maintaining.
all of which takes time, hence why i would (personally) like to see some up-front payment before committing time to such an idea.
l.