ugkamins@sunybcs.uucp (Dr. Chandra) (06/03/89)
One of the more annoying things is having the system go through all sorts of initializations when starting that result in more or less the same things being loaded into memory. Is there some way we could have the option of creating complete boot images that would be stored on contiguous sectors, thereby making your usual environment load faster, without all the disk seeking that goes on to read the next part of startup-sequence, then loading that command from wherever (usually c:), then getting the next line, and so on? I would still leave the option of a startup-sequence of some sort so that things that are dependent on the actual time of boot (such as my program that queries my modem for the time, where my modem has a real-time-clock) can still properly run. Certain things would be difficult to set up this way, but it would be nice if my shellseg, all my residents, my preferred shell, my preferences (instead of looking for system-configuration) and so forth were all there "instantly." You may even be able (perhaps selectively) to have daemons such as PopCLI in this image, since they mostly sleep. In this case, certain process control information would have to be intelligently handled (PC, location in memory, register state while sleeping, etc.) and stored in the boot image. What do you think? This idea comes to me from Radio Shack Color Computer III OS9.