On 7/26/21 5:36 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
I got it down to 14MB and it would, just barely, boot from the 16MB
SSD, although you could barely do anything as there was almost no
free disk space. It was a vain effort in the end -- being so minimal,
it booted in a few seconds from any medium. It did make the point
for the magazine that an OS would boot from SSD in a fraction of the
time of from hard disk -- and so that in some years, when SSDs were
common and cheap, they would be very desirable.
Interesting.
What _actually_ became doable and desirable never became really
possible with the Windows platform, sadly, although it's trivial with
Linux and quite easy with Mac OS X: to put the core OS and application
binaries on SSD, but keep the home directory on spinning media.
I've not really tried to do this on Windows. But I would wonder if you
could mount an alternate file system on top of the Users / Documents and
Settings folder using -- what I believe is called -- Dynamic Data
Overlay. Very much like you would mount /home as a file system
independent from /. I don't know if there would be any dependency on
Administrator's profile being accessible before DDO mounted everything.
Config files are tiny compared to modern binaries. They are read in
milliseconds, maybe microseconds.
I suspect that more time is spent finding them and traversing the file
system meta-data than reading the actual config files.
With OS X you can just move the user's home directory. /home is on the
OS drive but (e.g.) /home/lproven is on an HDD. This works perfectly
but it completely breaks OS X's tools for migrating to a new machine,
so I have reverted to using a Fusion Drive that RAIDs together an
SSD and an HDD into one volume.
I've never tried to do anything like this with OS X. I would naively
think that you could mount another file system on /home. But, maybe
there's dependencies that I'm not aware of.
There's no easy clean way to do this on Windows. You can't move /Users
without ugly registry hacks that can break compatibility.
This is why I've always tried to not alter the path to things. Instead,
rely on things like file system mounts / DDO to make the given path be
presented by a different file system.
The only rare exception would be like having /home be a symbolic link to
/path/to/home which is on another file system. This is how I have my
VPS use LUKS encryption. /home -> /var/LUKS/home; /var/spool/mail ->
/var/LUKS/var/spool/mail; etc.
I find that not altering the path means that you don't have to go
through things like registry hacks.
Ah well. Terabyte-class SSDs are affordable now; the method is
obsolete.
/me looks at the mailing list and the things that are discussed and
reject the "obsolete" portion of that comment.
You know, that's an excellent idea and I wish I'd thought of it then.
My desktop was an IBM PC-AT and would have made this difficult, and
mostly we used IBM PS/2 boxes, which still made it non-trivial --
no dangling a drive from the controller cable! But it was doable.
Where there is a will, there is a way.
Japanese and to an extent Chinese OSes were very instructive,
especially in historical context.
As the DOS PC conquered the industry in the West, it did not in Japan.
DOS could not handle Japanese fonts well enough; VGA is not really
enough for readable kanji, hiragana and katakana. So Japanese PCs
stayed non-IBM-compatible.
Interesting.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
