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 :)

How Gentoo saved the day

I received a couple of very old computer, two pentium III 500, one pentium II and one pentium MMX; all the RAM together they had was less than 1 G and the pentium II was aldready dead...

Anyway I had to figure what to do with these "wonderful" computer and I thought to use them as a compiling station, using the unix tool distcc
I did previous attempt at installing other distros of linux, but the only one i wanted to try with distcc was gentoo!

A complete afternood was spent just trying to make the pc (the distcc server and the distcc client) see each other! However when I made it, the compiling process was as swift as ever!
Actually i had some weird problems with the bootloader that wouln't run correctly, but in the end i managed to compile everything (kernel included) in my gentoo box!
Afterwards i just copied all the files from one hd to another and the two pentium III were done! Two gentoo installation in one!

Now that i have 3 distcc server running i'll enjoy myself compiling the other bigger utilities like X and the desktop environment...

after all this it's likely that I'll give these pcs to whoever needs them :)