On 2010-11-25, Neil Bothwick <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 24 Nov 2010 22:02:10 +0000 (UTC), Grant Edwards wrote: > >> I thought about using a customized systemrescuecd, but that takes ages >> to boot (almost 5 minutes). This CD is intended as something a >> customer can run to do a quick hardware test, and making them sit >> there for 5 minutes to see a 5-second test just isn't going to fly. > > It it actually booting all that time, or is it waiting for user input? I > doesn't take anything like that long to boot on my netbook, but I have > modified the USB install to set a keymap choice and a couple of other > options.
AFAICT, it's booting that whole time. I picked the initial isolinux menu entry that selects the US keymap, so there is no user input until it gets to the bash prompt. That time is booting on a qemu VM (but so is the ~10 seconds for the other CD I'm comparing to). I've since done a little testing with a Thinkpad T510, and the difference between the two CDs isn't nearly as much (maybe 5X instead of 30X). Since I don't need much in the way of resources (no networking or hard-drive acess) I've been thinking about ditching the squashfs stuff completely and just putting everything I need in the initrd image. That way I can disable the both the networking and IDE/PATA/SATA/SCSI support in the kernel. That ought to speed up the boot time considerably. >> Does anybody have an recommendations for a good way to build a small >> liveCD with a custom kernel module? > > Have you looked at Tiny Core Linux; 10MB, fast to boot and extensible. I've been doing some looking around, and that's now on my short list. -- Grant
