Booting to a minimal desktop faster

[florian]

PPR is great (pristine state)  but with a lot of extensions it can really also slow down the boot time.  I started thinking wether this would be possible to let the user into the desktop as fast as possible even it takes few additional seconds for every apps to become available.

Has anyone some though how this could be best achieved?

One approach I took was to put in my PPR only the essential tczs (core tcz, cpufreq, alsa, wireless, wm, etc...) and then tce-load the rest of the desktop applications and dependencies in a background process. It kind of worked in 2.2 although it wasn't playing too nice with the icons and jwm menu (and now that I've upgraded to 2.3 today, this got broken. First tce-load now requires some flags, but then when I iterate over files in directories with either tce-load -i or tce-load -i -f , I got some errors. still working on this)

[Guy]

Something to consider. Combining extensions into a large extension may speed up boot time. I havn't tried it.

Keeping very little in backup keeps boot time quick.

[curaga]

I see some possible issues with a solution like that:
- what if the icon/menu entry is being written to when wm/wbar starts?
- either extra flicker for every extension with a menu/icon entry, or extra wait plus one flicker