[TriLUG] Speeding up the boot process of a Linux box

[Alan Porter]

> What are some of the things you did?

The article talked about alternative init programs.  I used the init 
that was included with busybox.  Very straightforward stuff.

The article also talked about trimming the fluff like postfix, mysql, 
etc, that might or might not be used on your system.  This was not a 
problem on my system, because I only installed what needed to be there.  
I made my own startup scripts that only ran what was necessary.  This is 
basic embedded stuff.

The one thing I had very little control over was our touch screen 
driver, which was the only closed source part of our base OS.  Rather 
than allowing me to specify where the touch screen was connected, it 
insisted on probing the USB bus (which we never even loaded drivers for) 
and then finally looking at the serial port.  "No, don't tell me, it's 
got to be around here somewhere!"  Ugh.  That took several seconds.  At 
least I managed to remove the annoying BEEP it made when it found the 
touch screen device.

Other than that, I just payed close attention to when the screen 
displayed the various screens: the BIOS splash screen,  a bootsplash 
screen, a blank virtual terminal, a virtual terminal with console 
messages, X11 background, our application window.  In my case, "chvt" 
was my friend.

In our case, we did not spend a lot of time in the actual BIOS bootup.  
Most of our time was in starting X, loading the touch screen and 
starting our application.

Alan




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