Kernel question

[Bryan Maynard]

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
-- 
Open Source: by the people, for the people.