Speeding up to time to shell?

[Scorp1us]

When tiny core boots there is a moment where it's loading something (tcz "modules"?) with an animated spinner: -/|\- (repeat). With my setup it takes about 10 seconds just on that line, meanwhile Ubuntu boots from bios to their xwindows desktop in 10 seconds. I have everything installed ("installed") on a SSD. What can I do to get boot speeds that beat Ubuntu?

[Pats]

1) Edit onboot.lst and remove those ext which are not needed often daily use.
2) Try base boot code . Check wiki for more details abt bootcodes .
3) For some insight abt boot speed improvement , check this old link.
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=19127.0

http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=11235.0

[polikuo]

They are two irrelevant processes.

On Ubuntu, all system files has already been scattered around the disk.
Thus, by using a SSD, you get a significant performance boost due to the reading speed.

On TC, however, the files are compressed in packages (tcz).
When TC boots, they are decompressed and mounted as loop devices.
In case you're running in COPY2FS mode, the files are decompressed then copied to the ram.
Either way, the boot time depends on the amount of files you're loading and the speed of your processor.

So, to answer your question

What can I do to get boot speeds that beat Ubuntu?

Well, boot TC with bootcode base norestore. 
Or overclock your computer. (thought I doubt it would make much difference)

Please take the time and read this document or the book to understand the philosophies behind Tiny Core.

[Misalf]

If you have a lot of extensions set to be installed OnBoot and don't want to remove them, you can combine them to have one big extension to decrease boot time. I made a script for my installation of piCore on the Raspberry Pi to do just that.

http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,20709.msg129934.html#msg129934

[Rich]

Hi Scorp1us
I'm afraid polikuo hit the nail right on the head, you're comparing apples to oranges. Aside from the suggestions above, I
recommend if you don't treat  booting  like an application that you frequently run, then you will be less like to obsess over
boot time. If you can't do that, I suppose you could always cheat like Windows does and defer loading some extensions
to after the desktop is displayed. While you could do this in the  /opt/bootlocal.sh  which runs in the background, it would
still compete for time with whatever else still needs to run to get you to a desktop. You could set up a file in the  ~/.X.d
directory with a line containing:

Code: [Select]

tce-load -i Extension1 Extension2 Extension3 Extension4 ..... Of course this means you are now bypassing some of the mechanisms used by Tinycore for handling extensions.

Before doing anything, you could try adding the following boot codes:

Code: [Select]

printk.time=1 syslog After booting, go to  /var/log/messages.  Take a look through that file and see if anything is taking a long time to complete.
If it's just a few extensions causing most of the delay, maybe just defer loading them.

[Misalf]

Rich's suggestion to "debug" via  /var/log/messages  whatever takes too much time is totally worth a look.
The Windows'ish cheat might even suffice too.
But the best thing, IMHO, is that you can mess with TinyCore and make it, in many ways, behave like you want it to.
Remastering with your modifications and/or custom extensions is what I think is the way to go.
Apart from the most important aspect which is get to know TinyCore and how you can modify it.