Booting in Live CD mode is slow

[rdaneel]

Booting the Live CD (old and new revisions) its taking more than 2 minutes in fast PCs (1.7 GHz, 256 MB, CD 52X). Its slower than in emulators! (booting from hd images)

[nielx]

Moving all live-cd related tickets to alpha 1.

[scottmc]

This has improved, but we may be able to do even better.

[stippi]

I know Ingo is working on this one.

[bonefish]

Just generally: Of course booting in emulators is way faster than on real hardware. Particularly off CD. Those are abysmally slow media (particularly the seeking), while the on-HD images emulators use can be accessed with full HD speed (and a potentially cached by the host OS). E.g. on my machine under Linux from entering the qemu command line until Tracker and Deskbar show up 8 seconds elapse. On the actual hardware I don't even get fully through the BIOS initialization in that time, and booting Haiku itself takes way longer due to hardware discovery and initialization.

Anyway, in hrev36495 I enabled a special cache for CDs (given that enough RAM is available -- 256 MB is somewhat on the tight side). On my machine (Core i7, 4 GB RAM) booting off an anyboot CD takes about 1 min 10 s to the ReadOnlyBootPrompt, getting from there to the Desktop takes about 10 s, the background scripts (mimesetting and ssh key generation) are finished about another 40 s later.

I think that's acceptable for CD boot, but YMMV, particularly depending on available RAM and CD (drive) speed.