SystemRescueCd-1.5.1 has just been released. The boot process is now a lot faster thanks to OpenRC and to the reorganisation of system services. This important modification follows the complete rewrite of the initramfs which was achieved in SystemRescueCd-1.5.0.

The initramfs is the compressed file (initram.igz) which is loaded just after the kernel image. It loads important drivers (disk controller drivers and Ethernet drivers for network boot), it processes many options from the boot command line and it starts the normal system. This new versions is based on udev so that only the appropriate drivers are loaded, which accelerates the boot process. In old versions all supported kernel drivers were loaded in the first stage of the boot process. This new version still support the “doload=mod1,mod2,mod3″ and “noload=mod1,mod2,mod3″ which allows you to force / blacklist kernel modules. It also preserves compatibility with the existing boot options (ethx=ip, dns=ip, gw=ip, dodhcp, netboot=url, root=auto, root=LABEL=xxx, …)

SystemRescueCd-1.5.1 also comes with two important modifications: parted-2.2 has been patched to fix usability problems (”failed to re-read the partition table” error) which was annoying especially in GParted. This release also fixes problems with the intel xorg driver (xf86-video-intel) which makes the graphical environment extremely slow.

The standard kernels (32bit: rescuecd, 64bit: rescue64) are now based on a new configuration in order to provide a better support for hardware especially for disk controller and network drivers (including in the initramfs).