Optimizing Embedded or small Linux systems

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Embedded or small Linux systems
Ideas for optimizing speed, size, RAM, power and cost

At last! You completed the implementation of your embedded Linux system. 
It functions as specified. Your boss cheers up and you start to taste 
champagne in your month. However, it turns out that it doesn't boot fast 
enough, its interface or its response time are too slow, its files are 
too big and do not leave enough space for user files, or it consumes too 
much power. You could fix these issues by using a faster processor, more 
storage or a bigger battery, but this would make your system heat too 
much or exceed its cost requirements.

If you are facing one or several of these issues, there are many ideas 
and techniques that can help you to make your system meet or exceed its 
requirements, without having to make dramatic fixes to its implementation.

Free Electrons, an Free Sofware and Open Source embedded training and 
services company in the South of France, has just released a free 
presentation (http://free-electrons.com/articles/optimizations) 
summarizing the most popular or innovative techniques to increase system 
speed, reduce its RAM and storage space usage, and reduce its power 
consumption. In addition, most of these improvements translate in cost 
savings too.

Like the third edition of the Linux Device Drivers book, this 
presentation is released under the terms of the Creative Commons 
Attribution - ShareAlike 2.0 license 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/).

It is meant to further increase the visibility of the CE Linux Forum 
(http://celinuxforum.org/), which contributors gathered and benchmarked 
most of these ideas. CE Linux Forum is a non profit organization that 
spans many embedded systems companies, and actively works on making 
Linux kernel and applications meet the requirements of consumer 
electronic devices. Full details can be found on its developer wiki at 
http://tree.celinuxforum.org/pubwiki/moin.cgi .

You are all invited to experiment with these ideas, run your own 
benchmarks, implement new ones and share your results with the CE Linux 
Forum community.

Of course, all these techniques are no substitutes for a good and well 
thought design created with system expertise. However, they can help in 
achieving nice feature improvements once it is too late to make design 
changes.

In a nutshell, they are useful to reduce time to champagne!

-- 
Michael Opdenacker, Free Electrons
Free Embedded Linux Training Materials
on http://free-electrons.com/training