Success in replicating a fast boot time to the browser on a x60

[Charles Devereaux]

Hello

Among the things that first impressed me with coreboot was the boot time
demonstrated in  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKdLhbmjrDI

If anyone is interested, I could successfully replicate a similar boot time
on a debian wheezy, with a "modern" coreboot chain loading to grub2, on a
x60 tablet running at 1.66 GHz with a cheap SSD :

$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 2.244s (kernel) + 611ms (userspace) = 2.856s

Some notes :
 - it requires a kernel recompilation to get rid of modules that cause
delays (.config available upon request)
 - it requires systemd and following the suggestions on
http://www.holgerschurig.de/linux/systemd.htmt, along with creating several
other services and configuration files (available upon requests) to be
compatible with debian wheezy
 - I had to add a sleep 3 before starting the web browser with an actual
site to get the site to load (due to dhcp/wpa_supplicant/etc) - but with a
clock in hand, it boots just as fast as the video to the browser, and if
you just want a x-terminal (or even better, a console mode getty), you
don't need that!

I use linux-3.10.45 and systemd-stable v210, and you can see the result
from a systemd-analyze - about 2.8 seconds after coreboot+grub, which take
about 3 seconds. Add the delay for the web browser and you're good.

The results (varying between 2.4 and 2.9 seconds) are stable with the
reboots, and might be optimized even more, as I just did some very basic
things (I wanted to keep the virtual console mode for text mode stuff, etc)

$ systemd-analyze blame
           106ms systemd-logind.service
            84ms systemd-udev-trigger.service
            82ms cron.service
            82ms gpm.service
            79ms systemd-user-sessions.service
            47ms powertop.service
            45ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
            38ms dev-hugepages.mount
            37ms sys-kernel-debug.mount
            34ms tmp.mount
            28ms dev-mqueue.mount
            26ms systemd-networkd.service
            22ms systemd-remount-fs.service
            16ms loadkeys.service
            16ms systemd-fsck-root.service
            14ms systemd-update-utmp.service
            14ms systemd-journal-flush.service
            12ms udisks.service
            12ms ifupdown-clean.service
            11ms systemd-sysctl.service
            11ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
            11ms sshd@0-192.168.1.115:220-192.168.1.107:62685.service
            10ms kmod-static-nodes.service
             8ms chain.mount
             7ms [e-mail]
             7ms
dev-disk-by\x2duuid-c622cc92\x2dbaf6\x2d4663\x2db6ee\x2d4932b39f
             5ms systemd-random-seed.service
             4ms systemd-udevd.service
             1ms [e-mail]