The 10 second live CD - Machboot

[halfmanhalfamazing]

I saw this over at distrowatch news.........

http://www.machboot.com/

http://distrowatch.org/weekly.php?issue=20070917#feature

Whatever it is that he's doing to get it to boot in 10 seconds from a CDROM drive, it's phenomenal. I'd like to see other distros get this accomplished. With my SSD, the computer would probably boot instantly.

[llista]

In my experience USB installed distros boot much quicker than live CDs

[Kano]

This system is interesting, but you should know that the shown boottime is a very low, but not compareable. On my Core2 it shows 7s, but I have to use VESA override mode. Ok, even with my own code I could detect that in less than 1 s. You can not really speak of "detection" as most things are just assumed - a "normal" live cd would use udev for loading the modules, this alone needs more than 10s of time, but loads lots of modules more (basically every module possible). In an absolutely minimal live detection you would use udev + custom xorg detection without huge special cases. If you skip serial mouse detection you gain at least 2 s. Of course the startup of icewm is faster than a full blown KDE system. Nice idea, but in real live absolutely useless. Also the used kernel 2.6.16 is fully outdated - udev would require at least 2.6.18 to work with etch packages.

[yoshi314]

what's the point of having a quick booting livecd?

i mean, except for showoff.

i bet it could be done even better if somebody would tinker with LFS a bit. but what for?