... ultimate operating system, nothing could be faster, smaller or cheaper to beat it.
Not so sure : I remember such discussions during the golden age of Amiga computer. The conclusion was "decent C compiler can generate code as optimized as good assembly programmer most of the time but providing a high level programming capability". More, again if you take the example of AmigaOS (
perhaps the best operating system in term of resources efficiency I ever used), only very low level and critical functions are implemented in assembly (as example, the multi tasking scheduler) but most of the OS is in stock C. And the result is pretty good
I would also like to see tinycore combined with the BIOS on the motherboard with instant switch on and go !
IMO, what is killing bootup performances in PC, is the large kind of different hardware you have to support ... so implying long tests and probing at bootup.
You can save lot of time having a kernel only containing and optimized for the hardware you have, and removing most of hardware probing : I know which processor I have, no floppy, 4 USB port, the video card and so on. Only "dynamic" data have to be probed as amount of RAM and HD size.
The drawback is obviously you can't spread your customized kernel ; obviously, you have to build a new kernel if you're changing anything in your system configuration.
I did this exercise on SUN workstation under NetBSD to save some memory space but never under Linux ...