getting tc to boot fastest in qemu?

[linus72]

Alright, I been playing with installing tc/dsl,etc to partitioned qemu-img's and surprise-surprise
DSL-4.4.10 HD install(without enabling apt/upgrading gnutils) boots at a blazing
fast 35sec using "dma=on" and in single-user mode.

MyDSL frugal install boots in 1min45secs with rox, nedit, and jwmthemes + wallpapers.

Tied for 3rd are Tinycore_2.1rc2(with similar apps to DSL, except replaced firefox with Opera)
and BrowserPuppy47 at about 2min20sec:-[

So, that's a huge difference.
 
Now, how would I get the same/similar performance from tc?
If I did a scatter-mode install I would lose the ability to install pkgs, as with dsl hd-install.

I know Tc can boot faster or somehow be re-mastered for better performance in a emulator.
Any ideas?
Thanks

[robc]

Have you tried using tcz extensions? Using those over the tces will significantly increase boot time. The scatter mode will be your best bet for boot time with installed extensions. I have a frugal install of TC and my own version of persistent local. I actually moved my /usr/local directory to my hda3 partition and have my bootlocal.sh create a symlink to it on boot. I found it to be the fastest so far :-)
I also included a "base norestore" option in grub so if something breaks I use that, remove everything from the local directory in hda3, reboot and reload my desired extensions back into the persistent local.

I don't know why your setup is so much slower then a similar setup in DSL. I have created similar setups for my projects between DSL and TC and my boot times decreased by about 2/3rds when using TC. These are remasters though.

[linus72]

Well, maybe we should work on this, will you help me with re-master?
Would you like a portable-tinycore_2.1rc2 I have made?(220mb)

I would really appreciate your help Robc

[robc]

I just followed the remaster steps in the wiki: http://wiki.tinycorelinux.com/tiki-index.php?page=Remastering
When I got to the editing part i used the command "tar zxvf extension.tce --same-owner -C /path/to/source"
Unnecessary files were removed (headers, locales, unused modules, unused executables, etc.). Be sure to copy over all files from the home directory to /etc/skel then use "sudo rm -rf /path/to/source/home/*".  Edit the startup scripts, .xsession, bootlocal.sh, etc. chroot into the source directory, create any additional users I want, depmod and ldconfig.

The benefit of a remaster is that everything is in the compressed cpio image (tinycore.gz) so the longest part of the boot will be unpacking this. Also the benefit of TC over DSL is there are very few unnecessary pre-installed applications which really helps to decrease size. The KNOPPIX image that I used with my DSL installations is about 100MB where my TC image is only around 50MB. This is probably where most of the speed comes from. So you would need to look at your application and determine what parts are necessary what parts are not.

If you want to have a lot of speed out of a single contained iso then you could create a directory in the root of the iso and include the tcz extensions in this directory. Create a custom bootcode (or just hardcode it into tc-config) that will install all extensions found in this directory. Doing this will still allow a seperate tce directory for the user. The remaster section in the wiki has all the info for remaster and creating an iso image. The problem with this is the media that contains these extensions needs to remain mounted.

Another option to get some speed would be to unpack all the extensions that you are using into a single directory and repack all of these extensions together into one giant extension and use advdef to compress it further (this will take a long time with 200MB). This should save a little bit of time, and you would need to make sure the tce.installed files are present as not to break the appbrowser support.

[alu]

"dma=on"

i tried to add dma in the boot line of tc, and have the impression that it boots faster, indeed; try it and report if you see an improvement

[^thehatsrule^]

TC has DMA enabled by default

[sergey]

Regarding speed of booting TCL in Qemu. I did extensive testing to prepare my project, TinyCore Magic DILLocious Browser Anywhere (announced on the TCL Forum), and I've previously used DSL in Qemu. Results:

Qemu 0.8.2 boots TCL2 much faster than Qemu 0.9.0 -- and my modified Qemu 0.8.2 (taken from PupWinQE) is faster still. You can try it by downloading my SFX file, referenced in the TCL Forum. It is so fast that speed is excellent without kqemu (which would require Admin privileges), and TCL2 is much fast booting, running, and browsing than DSL4 in my tests. That's one reason I moved to TCL from DSL (my first love).

"Small is beautiful; Tiny is exquisite"

[linus72]

Sergey, this dillo magic thing, it only works on windows?
I don't have windows.

[sergey]

Sergey, this dillo magic thing, it only works on windows?
I don't have windows.

...
I envy you. My workplace is all Windows; my Public Library is all Windows; my University Libraries are all Windows, even the local restaurant WiFi hotspots require Windows for their "free" Login. TinyCore Magic DILLOcious Browser Anywhere provides a Linux environment in any of these places -- and it's totally secure: Linux OS is on an read-only ISO file, no files left behind since it runs in RAM. And TCL is so small & fast, that even in the Qemu VM, browsing with TCL's Opera 9.64, I was getting a 2 Mb/sec download speed for JPG file, 500 Kb/s for text (as measured by performance.toast.net).