On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 12:08:55PM +0100, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
Hi, I continued to investigate how to reduce the boot time with SeaBIOS and QEMU when it used with linuxboot_dma.bin (-kernel parameter). I reached ~12ms with a SeaBIOS configuration (attached) where I disabled debug output, all Hardware support (except SMM & MTRRs) and I applied a small patch to disable VGA setup and console (attached).
Is there any difference to "qemu -vga none" ?
Samuel, I put also the total time to userspace (linux_start_user) adding a probe in the kernel_init() and when I disabled the VGA in the SeaBIOS I noticed also a speed up in the kernel boot phase.
Might come from linux 16bit boot code scanning vgabios for available video modes (for vga=<mode> cmdline arg).
Another approach that I tried, obtaining similar results, is to recognize the linuxboot_dma.bin at runtime, then skip device_hardware_setup(), enable_vga_console(), and vgarom_setup().
Hmm, tricky.
linuxboot_dma.bin just registers a boot entry, so with "qemu -kernel -boot menu=on" you can still get a boot menu, and the direkt kernel boot is one menu item there. So you can't know for sure whenever a direct kernel boot will happen or not.
So, I think at minimum we should make this depend on both linuxboot_dma and boot menu disabled.
cheers, Gerd