On: Distri: 20x faster initramfs (initrd) from scratch

[hinkley]

He cuts 390ms off of time to passphrase prompt. Does that translate to 390ms faster boot time?

I can’t remember the last time I sat in front of a Linux box during reboot. Is that a pittance or a noticeable improvement?

[detaro → hinkley]

A "Linux box" might very well be a consumer electronics device, a car, ... 400ms boot time is quite a nice gain in those domains (although there's a bunch of different factors at play, so one would have to try and see how the numbers play out)

[michaelmrose → hinkley]

With full disk encryption you can turn on a system and have a usable light weight desktop up in 20 seconds.

Alternatively you can suspend and resume in most cases and have it in 2.

[swiley → michaelmrose]

If your DE is light enough just put it and its dependancies in the initramfs with your home folder (and /etc /var?) encrypted.

I used to do this, although without the encryption.

[hinkley → michaelmrose]

So it's less than 3% for WDE. The other thing I wasn't clear on is if this initramfs speeds up boot of 'normal' Linux machines, sans encryption.