[IDEA] Boot XBian from USB

[mk01]

just general reply to the benchmark/speed sd/usb. the speed of media is not the main factor there, RPI is too slow to take benefit from it (comparing class 10 sd with usb hdd for instance). but some benefit is seen when combined sd / usb. when I was briefly looking for some alternatives, I moved the home sub volume to usb stick and /usr/local to a sub volume on usb stick (the same one).

with the setup at that time, start of xbmc went down from 50s to 40s. but just to show how all relative is, my idea (in opposite to f1vefour) was always to have on sd card the needed minimum (boot initramfs from sdcard's boot area, connect lan and load rootfs from network). the network storage is capable for few bucks 250-300MB/s, 90MB/s over the network. so for example the 70mb of xbmc binaries and libs is instantly in cache of the server and pure xbmc start in 14s compared to 20s from local storage (with much less io load). on the other hand, latency is a problem on network though.

what we need is second core. not one faster, but second.

it is pure IMHO, but… RPI is amazing in HW decoding of video. so let's use it as media renderer. nothing else. my xbmcvideo and music db is at 750mb on mysql, I can't imagine RPI doing one update on it in case it would be locally.

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but what I wanted to say and forgot is that it simply doesn't make sense (wasting time going for speed) - at least not through moving installations to different media.

but, other aspects could be motivating: fail safe factor, time to restore from scratch etc.