@AndrewBell

Quote:

Will a Kickflash or eFlash be of any use with OS4, to reduce boot times etc?

Not yet. We'll see what can be done there, problem is that most of these cards have too little flashrom space to put a kickstart image in.

I've tried LZMA (the best compressor available I think) and I can compress a kickstart down to 1.6 MB, which would fit the big eFlash version. LZMA is relatively expensive to decompress if you only have a 68040 or so, so it might not be faster than loading the kickstart from disk.

What can be done with the current flashrom cards is to replace the scsi.device with the newer 52.x version of AmigaOS 4.0; that way you would get rid off the requirement to place the boot partition within the first 4 gigs of a disk. Another possibility would be to write a set of utilities that can generate a "pre-relocated" flat kickstart file on a harddisk and load that in directly at boot without going through an actual boot (it would obviously need to do direct disk access). That would probably also dramatically cut down on boot time, but since booting is relatively fast, the benefit is doubtful.

For reference, when I switch on my classic (IDE disk, unmodified vanilla install of AmigaOS 4.0 on it), I'm ready to go (i.e. on Workbench, and all startup has executed and the disk is quiet again) in 40 seconds. 15 or so seconds of that are taken by the first boot. You could cut this down by tweaking startup-sequence too (network startup takes quite a bit of time unless you put it into a "RUN"), or not loading a JPEG backdrop picture, etc.

_________________
Seriously, if you want to contact me do not bother sending me a PM here. Write me a mail