Hello
Sorry for this late reply, I have been a bit busy lately.
On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 12:24 AM, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli GNUtoo@no-log.org wrote:
I did a simlar setup some time ago for a narrower use case: I needed extremly fast reflashing times. I only had:
- A stock parabola(A GNU/Linux distro based on Arch)
- Good kernel commandline(to reduce logging)
- A well configured grub.
- No password at all, even for getty.
This is a good idea. At the moment, for simple tests I have a busybox doing just that. Too minimal though :-)
You could gain a lot of time by obtimising DHCP [1].
Indeed. Since then, I have had the best results at the moment with dhcpcd and the following options added to the bottom of debian dhcpcd.conf:
ipv6rs #ipv6ra_own #ipv4only noipv4ll noarp
The latest 2 options are the most helpful for speed. The rest is for my IPv6 setup.
At the moment, only dnsmasq is a bit of a hassle (used by resolvconf to do local caching + forward request to the DNS servers given by DHCP), but I must say I'm still using debian native script which does ExecStart=/etc/init.d/dnsmasq systemd-exec so there's obviously a lot of optimization to do.
I've no idea about wpa_supplicant though.
In my case, using priority in the network blocks and the following options is enough: update_config=1 eapol_version=2 fast_reauth=1 ## Hidden SSIDs #ap_scan=1
You could also replace the sleep by something better: you could look if
you can get the status of the network connection somehow:
IMHO, the best idea is to start the browser, then when the connection is established, issue a command to the browser to open the given page.
Actually, it could be interesting to provide a minimal "demo linux distro" that would do just what we said, to demonstrate how fast a coreboot boot can be. Something based on parabola or debian, using systemd, dhcpcd, and xorg without any password (where one has to provide the right xorg.conf)
It could provide a good reference, a metric.
How many miliseconds would be saved by putting grub.cfg directly inside
grub's coreboot.cfg?
I don't know. I should run tests :-) I remember reading that disk access was faster.
[1]http://cafbit.com/entry/rapid_dhcp_or_how_do
There was also an interesting BSD SoC project to implement this RFC 4436 in a free software modern dhcp client, but they found nobody this year: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/gsoc2014.html#rfc4436