Ron,
I just turned on the M810 motherboard I got from cwlinux.com which came delivered with an DoC with linuxbios, linux, and a root file system.
with 512 MB in two slots, it is about 5 seconds from turnon to a screen, and about 10 seconds to a login prompt. Very impressive.
Andrew, from here I assume that if I had an IDE drive I would mount it and pivot_root?
Actually the kernel doesn't include ide driver because we want to speed up the boot process. However, it does support nfs if you need to mount something from the network. Since everything is based on uClibc and busybox, you need to do $ mount -o nolock hostname:/data /data to mount nfs volume.
-Andrew