The combination of security issues, kernel tinification, and a renewed concern about fast boot has intensified focus on system boot, initialization, and configuration, so much so that there is now a Linux Plumbers Conference Microconference focused on these topics.

In addition to secure boot and minimizing size and bloat, this microconference will delve into a number of topics related to boot speed. These topics include tuning systemd for embedded systems, optimizing and/or delaying memory initialization, deferring initcall-based initialization, introducing parallelism and multicore earlier in boot, speeding up early-boot I/O, pre-loading known configurations, speeding up installation, and of course improved timing and tracing analysis earlier in system startup. In short, the fast-boot work has definitely moved into the sub-second realm. A final bonus topic is better configuring for cloud- and container-based workloads.

For more information on this topic, see the wiki page.