USB booting :: Boot faster DSL3.4

I have started looking into modding initrd, but I cant really see the benefit (most stuff can be disabled via kernel params).

using "nousb" and loading usb later might help, will try that. I have the data for my kiosk on a second USB stick.

Thanks for the help - I have a better understanding of the whole process now.

My conclusion is that the bootloading is the bottleneck - loading the image into memory from USB is taking up most of the time.
So I need to get a faster bootloader (any suggestions welcome) or/and make the image smaller.

Thanks again

Well, delete everything you don't need to make it smaller..
Firefox takes a lot of space for example..

It would replace the current initrd system with an optimized one... it's different from passing cheatcodes.

You could also try booting with the regular non-initrd version with dma enabled and see if how your systems performs with that.

What do I need in linuxrc (in initrc24.gz) to just startup X and xmms (and my app)?

There are a lot of checks and balances in the file (that I dont need) - any documentation on it, something more detailed than the following?

Mount /proc, /dev/pts, /sys
Loads modules
Some housekeeping (setting PATH etc)
Swap out paths with /KNOPPIX (/sbin)
Creates and mounts ramdisk for /home and /var
More housekeeping (links /KNOPPIX/dev,etc to /dev,etc etc)
Exit to let init take over (I will replace this with starting X etc)

It is pretty compact, you need at least all the "housekeeping", mounting and module stuff. To squeeze some seconds off the boot, disable checks for hardware which you now use no-- codes for altogether. As it takes a split second to check for a no-- boot parameter..

I would not recommend starting X from linuxrc, real init does some "housekeeping" too..

Next place to edit is /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig and dsl-config in the same directory.

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