This paper explains a study of the customizing for fast booting in the embedded linux. It includes several techniques and experiments to reduce boot-up time. The customizing for a fast booting is a complex problem because it is related to many subjects like a boot-loader, kernel, device drivers, file system, user-space initialization and applications, etc. It needs to understand these wide ranges of subject to make boot faster. Some people use linux power management suspend/resume operations to make boot faster. Lineo solutions extremely reduced boot-up time using their ‘Warp 2’ technology based on snapshot boot. It only takes 2.97 seconds on a Freescale i.MX31 400㎒ board. Although it much faster than existing suspend-to-disk capability, we will only discuss a normal booting here.
All the tests were performed on our powerpc-based embedded custom board (called mpc8349ehg3). We also developed a program, called ‘Bootstamp’, to measure the booing time. It can not only track the time of booting steps but also help analyze the each step at a view of the time-domain. This is described in the chapter 2. About a 5695 milliseconds boot time could be achieved on the mpc8349ehg3. Tests proceeded with four phase and every experiment was recorded by the Bootstamp program. This is described in chapter 3. Finally the mpc8349ehg3 boot time image will be provided, and the possibility of linux as operating system for embedded systems will be discussed in the conclusion.