Re: [Qemu-devel] Anyone seeing huge slowdown launching qemu with Linux 2.6.35?

[Alexander Graf]

On 04.08.2010, at 19:46, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 07:36:04PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote:
>> This is basically my suggestion to libguestfs: instead of generating
>> an initrd, generate a bootable cdrom, and boot from that.  The
>> result is faster and has a smaller memory footprint.  Everyone wins.
> 
> We had some discussion of this upstream & decided to do this.  It
> should save the time it takes for the guest kernel to unpack the
> initrd, so maybe another second off boot time, which could bring us
> ever closer to the "golden" 5 second boot target.
> 
> It's not trivial mind you, and won't happen straightaway.  Part of it
> is that it requires reworking the appliance builder (a matter of just
> coding really).  The less trivial part is that we have to 'hide' the
> CD device throughout the publically available interfaces.  Then of
> course, a lot of testing.

Why not go with 9p? That would save off even more time, as you don't have to 
generate an iso. You could just copy all the relevant executables into tmpfs 
and boot from there using your kernel and a very small (pre-built) initrd.

Alex