Great article on speeding up boot time. Sure it's for a specific Automotive dashboard application, but these types of embedded systems are soon to surround us - from our thermostats to our refrigerators.
Here's how they buried the lead. "For those who wonder why a processor doing billions of instructions per second needs to take minutes to boot up, wonder no more; MontaVista has shown that you can boot up a complete modern operating system in less than a second."
Innovators get Linux to boot in 1 second - 3/4/2010 - via EDN