20s boot

Finally i had some time to play with Gentoo on the Toshiba M200 i bought from the USA.
this time i wanted to tune every possible bit of the kernel in order to obtain a quickest boot as possible! i seem to have managed to fullfill my plans!

here is a couple of hints i can share (some of them might a little bit risky)

• first of all, i tried to make the kernel as small as possible, totally moduable a very little built in! i believe there's now only the pci, ide, generic x86 istructions and the root fs support, while all the rest gets loaded at boot.
• to know which modules are absolutely necessary, take a look at the udev printing! move all the modules it loads to /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.6 and then disable the RC_COLDPLUG variable in /etc/conf.d/rc.
• while in /etc/conf.d/rc you can also set the PARALLEL stuff in order to speed up services starting, but it's not very effective
• i shrunk the root partition so that the checkroot service will take much less time for controlling the filesystem. While here i also modded the init script to hdparm the drive before performing the scan.

Well that's more or less what i tried to do, and everything seems to work fine!
next target: create an initramfs to load the modules for an even faster boot :)