Shorter boot time on the Arietta G25

Short story: my Arietta G25 now boots to prompt in 3.9 s instead of the stock 50.7 s. Nice.

I had a hack about with reducing the boot time of the Arietta G25 ARM9 based Linux board. I’m planning on doing some kernel hacking so shorter is better as it cuts the build/push/test cycle down.

My log is here. I pulled the usual tricks like switching to custom init scripts (eck), dropping udev for mdev, and doing things like USB Ethernet initialisation as late as possible.

I had a few surprises: LZO is faster than Gzip (despite being bigger and taking longer to load from SD), -O2 is faster to boot than -Os (despite being heavier on the cache), and switching from 115200 baud to 460800 also made a difference.

This is all against a Chromebook host with Crouton. The USB Ethernet also works fine once I switched the board from EEM to ECM mode.