[Fedora-livecd-list] Performance

[jeff]

Glen Eustace wrote:
> It may be worthwhile thinking about how to improve the performance by
> coping more stuff into the RAM Disk. In my case there is a trade off
> between the initial boot speed and the speed of the application. If it
> takes too long to boot because of the copies, the users will get
> annoyed.  It seems somehow better to have things actually happening on
> the screen even though they are a little sluggish to start with.

For performance a few things have come to mind.

1) What about running the prelinker in the chroot before the ISO is rolled?

2) Currently mkzftree is using -z 3 for compression. What is the 
tradeoff between -z 9 and -z 3? Certainly it will take longer to 
compress, but what about decompression--is it much of a CPU hit? It 
seems the bottleneck is reading from the CD--it's not CPU bound doing 
decompression (unless on a really old box). So if the files were smaller 
there would be less data to read in and hence the CD would run faster.

3) Also, since mkzftree is one of the most time consuming processes, it 
would be nice if you could pass a -p option to it (parallelize).

4) By listening to the booting of the CD, it sounds like the head of the 
CD drive seeks quite a bit. Is there any optimization we can do so the 
CD can be read (more) sequentially?

===============


It would be nice if there was an option to kadischi to either keep or 
remove the built dirs (e.g. -k == keep build tree). It's nice to poke 
around in those.

What's up with setting the video resolution? I haven't investigated this 
yet, but I've been getting a very low resolution (640x480 or maybe 
800x600). How can kudzu set a higher resolution? Can this be passed at 
the boot: prompt?

In livecd-mkinitrd.sh it makes symlinks for busybox applications. It 
would be handy if it symlinked for all the programs busybox is compiled 
with. It won't take more space, but make the initrd more "featureful" at 
zero cost.

I did a chroot into the build dir and something as simple as "adduser" 
didn't work. It returned without error, but the user wasn't added. I 
didn't look into why yet, but anyone have an idea?

Perhaps updatedb could be run, if slocate is installed.

Also, re: ash/sash from a few days ago, I haven't fully tested it, but 
since ash is just a busybox symlink I don't think ash/sash needs to be 
on the CD (which is what I initially thought).

Thanks again!

-Jeff

P.S. I'll 'zilla some of the above if they don't get shot down here.