On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 09:03:41PM -0500, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 02:11:20PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
I noticed also with libguestfs that boot times have spiralled out of control again, and it seems to be down to the SeaBIOS change. SeaBIOS accounts for _9_ seconds of the boot sequence, up from very small (fraction of a second) for the old Bochs BIOS[1].
I'm surprised - a significant amount of effort has gone into making SeaBIOS boot quickly. On my machine, the OS starts loading in well under a second.
By a process of elimination, last night I worked out that the change is down to the following option ROMs:
gPXE (not sure which exactly): 5 seconds pxe-virtio.bin: 4 seconds
I can't find the source for the latter, but it seems neither is part of SeaBIOS, but are added from other sources by the Fedora build of qemu.
I built a custom version of SeaBIOS [nicely documented code BTW, once I'd read the README file it was very simple to understand and customize!] which booted in under a second.
Rich.