How to make the uclinux boot faster?

Are you using JFFS2 as your boot filesystem? If so this is known to be quite slow.

I had great luck speeding up booting by leaving the kernel uncompressed in flash. The time to copy into RAM was increased by 2 seconds to about 4 seconds but the decompression took about 6 seconds. You can do this by using the vmlinux file in the kernel directory under uClinux directory.

If you are using initramfs make sure that if you are using compression you only use one on the entire kernel or on the filesystem. You can change the initramfs filesystem compression by going to the linux kernel configuration under general setup, Built-in initramfs compression mode and setting it to none.