fso-boot

written by Mickey on 2010-02-02

I'm fed up with booting my Linux-based smartphones like desktop-systems. Two major developments will help me accomplish enormous improvements in boot speed:

• devtmpfs -- kernel support for the /dev file system
• dbus system activation -- on-demand launching of dbus-based services

I'm going to carry out the following two tasks in OE:

1. Writing fso-boot, a small executable written in C, which mounts the filesystems, brings up DBus and (optionally) launches X11
2. Setting fso-boot as new init process, that way you still have sysvinit and udev in your root file system, but they're not active unless explicitly asked for

I'll do that for the freesmartphone.org adaptation for the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1, Google ADP-1), which I'm running on 2.6.32 (necessary for devtmpfs) -- stay tuned for the first benchmarks.