[gentoo-user] Re: On what to base a custom live CD?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2010-11-25, Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk> 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