On 19.07.2010, at 09:33, Gleb Natapov wrote: > On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 08:28:02AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: >> On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 09:23:56AM +0300, Gleb Natapov wrote: >>> That what I am warring about too. If we are adding device we have to be >>> sure such device can actually exist on real hw too otherwise we may have >>> problems later. >> >> I don't understand why the constraints of real h/w have anything to do >> with this. Can you explain? >> > Each time we do something not architectural it cause us troubles later. > So constraints of real h/w is our constrains to. > >>> Also 1 second on 100M file does not look like huge gain to me. >> >> Every second counts. We're trying to get libguestfs boot times down >> from 8-12 seconds to 4-5 seconds. For many cases it's an interactive >> program. >> > So what about making initrd smaller? I remember managing two > distribution in 64M flash in embedded project.
Having a huge initrd basically helps in reusing a lot of existing code. We do the same - in general the initrd is just a subset of the applications of the host OS. And if you start putting perl or the likes into it, it becomes big. I guess the best thing for now really is to try and see which code paths insb goes along. It should really be coalesced. Richard, what does kvm_stat tell you while loading the initrd? Are there a lot of PIO requests or are we simply looping inside qemu code? Alex
