Ubuntu :: Cache Hardware Configuration For Faster Boot?

I am using Ubuntu Maverick on my Eeepc 701, and everything is working quite nicely. Since I only have 4GB SSD drive, my setup is that the LiveCD is booted from the SSD, while my 'casper-rw' partition is on a 4GB SD card. I have 2GB of ram and do not use swap. I am wondering if there is a way to somehow cache the results of the hardware probe and configuration, and insert the cache into LiveCD by remastering it. The idea is that less time will be needed to boot, since everything that was found from the first boot was saved.

Of course this would mean that particular modified LiveCD wouldn't reliably boot on anything other than my system (or one like it), but seeing as how my hardware won't change in the future, it isn't a problem.

Is something like this possible? I'm not afraid of recompiling a kernel or rebuilding an initramfs if needed. A possible alternative idea to accomplish this would be to boot up the vanilla LiveCD as normal, configure a swapfile, hibernate, then inject this swapfile into the LiveCD image.

This way, every boot would automatically just be resuming from hibernation. This could potientally mess with the casper-rw partition, but that is something I would worry about later (and I am not opposed to just eliminating the casper-rw partition altogether and running off ram each boot).

The other problem might be that the swapfile would probably need to be the size of my ram (2GB). Chances are, after a fresh boot my ram will be mostly empty, therefore would it be possible to compress the swapfile (like swapfile.gz)? I will be looking into either alternative, but I was hoping to get some opinions / ideas on how to accomplish this (or whether it has already been done!)

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