Kernel question

[Nikolas Britton]

On 6/29/05, Bryan Maynard <bryan.maynard at reallm.com> wrote:
> Hey helpful friends! :-D
> 
> I would like to conduct an experiment: down the road (a couple years maybe)
> I'd like to start building and selling PCs. I'd like these PCs to run FreeBSD
> - because it's the best ;-). These machines will be a slightly different from
> the current crop in that they will be laptops that will not have PCMCIA slots
> or CD/DVD drives (these items will be held in a separate "breakout box"). The
> machines wil lbe completely sealed with the exception of the various memory
> card (SD, CompactFlash, Memory stick, etc.) embeded in the monitor casing.
> 
> There's much more to these machines, but I'll save those details for the
> appropriate place - my question for here is this:
> 
> I'd like to minimize boot time as much as possible. Since these machines will
> not ever have hardware added or changed I would like to statically build as
> much device information as early in the boot process as possible.
> 
> I understand that FreeBSD has a three stage boot process. I'm a bit fuzzy as
> to what happens when, but was wondering how, or if, I could cut out any of
> these stages - and shorten the remaining stages as much as possible.
> 
> I've looked around loader.conf, device.hints, <KERNEL>.hints, and such and
> this is what got me wondering.
> 
> If you all need anymore info please let me know.
> 
> Thanks a lot!
> 
> Bryan
> --

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/arch-handbook/boot.html

Man pages:
loader.conf
loader
loader.4th
boot
btxld
boot0cfg
device.hints
kenv

The majority of the boot process time is the BIOS testing and
initializing hardware and there is no simple way around this.

The best place to start is to rip everything out of the kernel config file.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/kernelconfig-config.html