[openbeos] Re: x86 boot loader milestone

i dont get it : BeOS boots in what, 15 seconds?
are we really trying to decrease boot time?  it doesn't seem painful to 
me at all when (if ever) i have to reboot.  so why the efforts?  

personally i think its a neat idea - but only for the sake of 'it would 
be cool if it works'.  i highly doubt that you can reduce boot times 
significantly without storing the entirety of the critical OS 
components on the flash card.  but hey, i'm a pessimist.  if you can 
make me boot in 5 seconds i'll eat my words :)
-jared

> > This is too funny. I am working on exactly this same thing! :-)
> > 
> > What I was thinking was that I would make a ram disk and mount home 
> > as the ram 
> > disk. And turn off VM. Certain critical things (preferences) would 
> > be 
> > copied 
> > back to the CF. So far, it does boot pretty fast. The next step was
> > /
> > is to 
> > investigate LinuxBIOS to see if we could boot with that. :-)
> > 
> > Michael
> 
> I gotta admit, when I talked with you about a month or so ago your 
> comments on what you were doing did help direct my ideas :)  Here's 
> what just came to mind that I was wondering if it was feasible.  It's 
> possible and rather easy now to make an image of a drive or a 
> filesystem.  Is it possible, however, to create an image of RAM?  
> Given 
> that there is the AGMS RAM filesystem, I think it should be possible.  
> If so, would it be possible to boot the system until the instant 
> before 
> the UserBootscript is processed, and take an image of the current 
> memory contents and store them on the CF card?  That way, when the 
> system boots, instead of re-loading things from the boot drive, etc 
> it 
> can restore the memory contents and pick up where it left off 
> (process 
> UserBootscript, etc).  Of course, there would have to be a check of 
> some sort before the RAM image dump happens so that in case something 
> changes and needs reprocessing it can be done.  DHCP, device 
> detection, 
> and things of that nature will have to be done after the RAM image 
> restore.  Anyway, it's just a random idea I had, there may be enough 
> things that must be detected and re-configured every boot that makes 
> this system have no practical use.  But some things always are loaded 
> into memory (kernel parts, app_server parts, tracker parts, etc etc), 
> and they may benefit from this.
> 
> 
> 
> -Ben
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------
> Commander Sozo
> CommdrSozo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 


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