I would like to talk more. I've seen some presentations and demos of Linux booting in under a second. That's my primary goal. Secondary is maximizing the free space on the eMMC for content (in my case, MP3 files). I haven't really tried doing a lot in this regard for now, but would like to over the next three months.
I have not personally got there Rick. But just a base minimalfs install, I've persnally seen 10-15s. Which is to say Roberts barefs install. No tweaks.
My project is a "radio" that benefits greatly from a lighting-fast boot:
Antique Radio Podcast Player
I would imagine a great many BBB-based devices would benefit from very fast boot, although this is only necessary for deployment builds, not necessarily for development builds (e.g., you can leave in the u-boot delay on a development system).
And, I probably want to hang on to sshd, since logging in is helpful. But long-term, if it can run my C++ app and the node.js UI I'm building on top of it, and get the C++ app up and running in under 2 seconds, I'll be very happy (the node.js can take longer to start). I'll need Wi-Fi networking, and even that can come up after the C++ app has started, so long as the C++ app can reliably keep trying to make a network connection.
So Roberts barefs install with *just* openssh-server sits at around 75-80M total on disk. I have not installed to eMMC *yet* but have had a working install with openssh-server @ around 80M or slightly less. Then with Nodejs + express + socket.io + very basic Nodejs app, we're talking 175M. This for me included a ntp client, and a few other base packages like psmisc, and yeah, I'd have to check my install notes which I may / may not have with me at the moment ( I'm out of town again for a few weeks yet - again ).
But the main idea, that for me. I have a base install to do everything I need for a base "test-app" that can be displayed / configured via a web browser, in around 175-180M total space on disk. But to achieve this I needed a base install NFS share + a development NFS share. The development share is all the tools I needed to compile my own packages for the base install. Including all the dependencies for various "things", and stuff like CheckInstall to build packages( debs) for my base install. Where the base image is just the bare minimum installed to run all the stuff I need . . . I know it sounds kind of wonky when i explain it this way. But perhaps when i get a spare week or so to lay it all out in a blog post it can / would sound a bit more coherent ? I have a lot of notes I need to put together . . . Plus I've been trying to get other things done such as trying to show others how to use / setup device tree files for 3.14.x.
I definitely don't need NFS, nor really the ability to build packages on the BBB. In fact, I'd love to get to where I'm cross-compiling everything, and building a tarball I can easily transfer over. Eventually, I want my app to be able to update itself, if not the entire filesystem.
Definitely the blog post will be good, and any good documentation on using device trees is critically important (there's too much out there about 3.8.x, and not enough about how to do it in 3.14+).
