"Scattered mode" file system

[wolf]

I realize this is against the Tiny Core philosophy, but still...:

My system is slowed down significantly when errors are written to stdout. This causes the boot time to about triple, because some of the "On Boot" or "On Demand" extensions spew out a variety of otherwise insignificant warnings when they are unpacked. Also, mounting the extensions takes time that could be saved by simply having the files pre-unpacked on the persistent storage to begin with, that is, like a traditional filesystem. This would also eliminate the undesired warnings because they occur while the extensions are unpacked.

According to the Concepts document (sorry, can't create external links), it seems to be possible to perform a traditional install, but I haven't been able to find documentation for it.

I thought about installing the extensions the usual way, then moving the entire /usr/local folder to persistent storage, removing everything from onboot.lst, and finally creating a symbolic link from /usr/local to the persistent storage early in the boot sequence (if at all possible), but this doesn't seem feasible either: several folders (such as /usr/bin) include symbolic links to /tmp/tcloop, and putting /tmp/something on persistent storage expecting it to persist is a guaranteed failure.

How do I create a "traditional" install?

[curaga]

How about reporting which extensions and which errors first

[wolf]

How about reporting which extensions and which errors first

It's the "sun-jre" extension, which writes warnings that the source and target files for the "cp" command are the same file. Java appears to be working, so these warnings can probably be safely ignored; it's just that on my system they slow it down significantly during boot.

But then, that's not really the primary issue although on my system it happens to be the major boot time culprit. It does take a while to mount the extensions, and this boot time could be shortened to zero if they didn't have to be mounted individually. With plenty of hard drive space, the tradeoff between boot time and storage is very simple to make for me, and clean boots are even possible if everything is installed on a read-only filesystem (which, of course, would be mounted as read/write during upgrades).