Quote Originally Posted by drboo
I have had this dream for a while myself. Has anyone been able to find substancial data on how many bios's these days support USB booting? I'd love to have a 256Mb keychain drive with a bootloader and some small versions of livecds for different hardware (x86/PPC/Sparc)
Only the modern motherboards supports this. If you take an average hobbyist computer, I'd bet it doesn't support it. If you want to build computers with this function, you can easily find motherboards today.

Don't build a distribution that uses the USB disk for frequent writing. Flash devices supports about 1 000 000 write cycles during their lifetime. This may sound much but in reality is very little. If your OS runs from the USB like a HD, you will burn out the USB flash disk quickly. So stick to only writing few times, like saving configs etc. Use RAM disks for runtime info.