Initrd

[David Cottrill <david.cottrill@nchsoftware.com>]

I'm busy optimising for boot speed now (my base hardware is P2 300MHz /
128MB ram) and so far I've got it down to a little under 3 minutes. The
same disk boots in 38 seconds on an 1.6G Atom.

My next step is to attempt to remove initrd from the kernel as that
stage of the boot process is now well over half my boot time.

Is there a reason why this is doomed to failure?

I'll be using this with fully static/known hardware so there is no need
for hardware detection after start up. Strangely the keyboard is
recognised at any point and is usable, but USB devices are not (not a
problem for me).

Has anyone else not seen a speed improvement after using the
boot=quickreboot flag?

To date I have:
stripped the Debian boot menu
commented out the shutdown prompt
switched off udev
removed hald and all dependencies
avoided installing network-manager

David Cottrill
NCH Software
Level 3, 28 University Avenue
GPO Box 1169
Canberra ACT 2601
Australia