Why bios(generic) is slow?
Eric W. Biederman
ebiederman at lnxi.com
Sun Jan 5 00:27:01 CET 2003
hcyun at etri.re.kr writes:
> Hi
>
> Can you tell me why generic bios is so slow compared to linuxbios.
> In other word, why linuxbios is fast?
> I think "do little thing" is not enough to explain x10 time difference.
> What does bios do other than linuxbios does and where it spend so much
> time?
I have wondered that and looked, and on some desktop systems boot up
with a standard BIOS is something like the time LinuxBIOS takes. But
for server systems, and other lower volume systems I suspect someone
just does a lousy job.
Beyond that. The easy things to mess up are things like the MTRRs.
If they are not turned on at the appropriate time you can easily get
a 10x slowdown.
Eric
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