"Ronald G. Minnich" wrote:
On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Erwin Rol wrote:
What times are we talking about ?
really slow!
Could you give any benchmarks ? like how long it takes from turning on the computer until init is called ?
right now the gunzip step takes up to ONE MINUTE. I've got something set up wrong, and I hear that there is a needed step in the PII to make it "run fast". It seems to be running at 8086 speeds ...
Hmmm that sucks :-/ but i am sure it is just a mather of time before you (or someone else) will find the problem.
It would be _very_ interesting to have a (custom) init running within 2 second or less after powerup, could you see this happening ?
I think it is possible.
The big issue is bandwidth to the NVRAM. You need to suck 512K out of the NVRAM. If the NVRAM has 1 MB/sec bandwidth, this step takes 1/2 second. If we had 16 MB/second nvram, then obviously we're faster.
Sad to say, there's only an 8-bit path to NVRAM. And flash is slow. This is a long-term problem.
The faster the NVRAM, the better.
Not much one can do about the hardware, appart from choosing the motherboard wizely.
(of course that will exclude slow starting things like SCSI controlers and the like, and no auto probing , everything preconfigured in the kernel)
From what I'm seeing the scsi is slow but not terrible. The scsi bioses
stink, though.
Time for a open SCSI BIOS :-) ?
ron p.s. my goal for a cluster node is cold boot in 7 seconds, reboot in 5 seconds. I think it's quite possible.
Hmmm that will be the absolute maxium. And what do you understand in "cold boot"? This is what happens:
1) reset/poweron 2) BIOS sets up hardware 3) BIOS loads/unzips kernel in RAM 4) BIOS jumps to kernel 5) kernel sets up the hardware 6) kernel creates the init process 7) init starts the application processes
Ofcourse step 6 and 7 depend on where you load those applications from slow floppy, HD, FLASH disk, CMOS-RAM disk etc.
so what is included in your 5-7 seconds ? :-) Faster is better. the best would be an up and running X11 desktop with netscape and all within 500 mseconds :-)
- Erwin
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