Using flash memory to speed up boot time?
 

Hi, I read somewere that someone (maybe apple?) was using internal flash memory to speed up the boot times of portable systems.

Would it be possable to install some internal flash memory in one of my pc's (laptop or desktop)?

If it were, then could I not also set the mount point of the flash memory to be that of the paths used in the start up process?

by doing this It would speed up the start up time by a lot.

Would it also be possable to dedicate a part of my ram, to house the start up process?

thx

AFAIK CF access is not faster compared to memory, it's not durable media (limited amount of writes) and besides that, what you would store? I think that if you take an average boot process you would see that the majority of IO are reads and not writes, but the *real* "lag" isn't from IO but starting services in sequence, so the first thing would be to disable any services you don't need. Also what's written is mostly log and pidfiles. You could have those in memory (mount a tmpfs) but if the box goes belly up you'll loose all that data. I've read about a replacement which can start services in parallel but it's not stable, not w/o problems. Even if you successfully got it to work I think it's relative since there's dependencies you'll have to live with, like bringing up network.

ok, thx

btw, I have installed initNG it seems stable (no problems so far) and is also a lot speedier.