Michael Phipps wrote:
The truth is, as fast as BeOS (esp off of compact flash) boots, there is little benefit to doing this. You might save a whole second or something. Investigating a faster BIOS (i.e. LinuxBios) makes a whole lot more sense, from a "speed up the boot process" point of view, than looking at this. I considered the same things but don't think that it is worth bothering with. That's just my POV on it.
OTOH, I think that this could be a huge feature if it had nothing to do with bootup. How cool would it be if you could hit some key combo and the system would freeze for a few seconds, pouring data onto the HD. When it was done, you would have a complete, bootable image of exactly where you where at that moment? Not to save boot time, but for other things - like saving all of your apps exactly where they were. This would also work better than a boot setup because you would restore user processes, not kernel processes. Things like drivers need to init properly. You can't have an image do that without special knowledge. OTOH, if you boot to a normal (open)BeOS kernel with new driver instances and all, then restore the userland processes, that might work better.