During development of our new Snapper 9260 module, one of the requirements was for boot times (power -> prompt) of less than 6s. Since the (rather feature-rich) development system boot time was in the order of 45s, there was quite a bit of scope for improvement: - Enable MMU and data cache in U-Boot: by default, U-Boot does fairly minimal initialisation of hardware. We extended main board support and network driver code to support making full use of the instruction cache (easy) and data cache (a bit more interesting). Time saving: ~3s. - Use on-board storage for kernel and root filesystem, instead of NFS. Time saving: ~2s. - Rationalise U-Boot environment: remove the boot delay, flatten out dynamically-generated bootup scripts, use uncompressed image (or gzip-compressed image if space is a constraint) instead of self-decompressing image, disable redundant image verification. Time saving: ~2s. - Strip unneeded drivers out of Linux kernel: by removing unneeded systems (eg. networking, unneeded filesystems, debugging facilities, splash logo), we reduced the Linux kernel size from 3.6Mb to 1.8Mb. Time saving: ~1.5s, plus reduced kernel boot times. - Add 'quiet' to Linux boot arguments, suppressing synchronous printk output. Unlike removing printk support entirely, the bootup messages are still available via dmesg, supporting field debugging. Time saving: ~2s. - Preset loops-per-jiffy setting for Linux kernel. Time saving: ~0.25s. - Strip filesystem to avoid unneeded subsystems, slow init() scripts, minimise footprint. Time saving: ~30s. Overall, these changes allowed us to reduce the boot times for the unit to 5.2s - well within the 6s target - without sacrificing support for interactive access and field upgrades. We hope to gain another 1.2s back between power-on and start of execution by using a new revision of the AT91SAM9260 chip (an erratum on the 'A' revision silicon), which should bring overall time below 5s - not bad for a full-featured Linux device!