[LinuxBIOS] etherboot/filo + sata startup timing

[Ward Vandewege]

Hi YH and list,

I've been playing with the boot prompt timeouts for Etherboot/filo on my
setup.

I've noticed that if I set the combined timeout (the etherboot ASK_BOOT and
filo AUTOBOOT_DELAY) to less than about 3 seconds, the system won't boot
because filo doesn't see the SATA drives. This example has ASK_BOOT set to -1
(i.e. disabled), and AUTOBOOT_DELAY set to 2 seconds.

---------------------------
Welcome to elfboot, the open sourced starter.
January 2002, Eric Biederman.
Version 1.3

    33:stream_init() - rom_stream: 0xfffc0000 - 0xfffdffff
Found ELF candiate at offset 0
Loading Etherboot version: 5.4.1
Dropping non PT_LOAD segment
New segment addr 0x10000 size 0x49090 offset 0x0 filesize 0xf7f0
(cleaned up) New segment addr 0x10000 size 0x49090 offset 0x0 filesize 0xf7f0
Loading Segment: addr: 0x00000000bff90000 memsz: 0x0000000000032000 filesz:
0x000000000000f7f0
Clearing Segment: addr: 0x00000000bff9f7f0 memsz: 0x0000000000022810
Loading Segment: addr: 0x0000000000042000 memsz: 0x0000000000017090 filesz:
0x0000000000000000
Clearing Segment: addr: 0x0000000000042000 memsz: 0x0000000000017090
Jumping to boot code at 0x100b0
CPU 2064 Mhz
Etherboot 5.4.1 (GPL) http://etherboot.org
Drivers: TG3 FILO   Images: NBI ELF
Protocols: DHCP TFTP
Relocating _text from: [000100e0,00059090) to [bfeb7050,bff00000)
Probing pci disk...
[FILO]FILO version 0.4.1 (root at countzero.vandewege.net) Fri Apr 21 18:47:00 EDT 2006
Press <Enter> for default boot, or <Esc> for boot prompt... 2^H ^H1^H ^Htimed out
boot: hde1:/linuxbios.elf
No drive detected on IDE channel 2
boot: hde1:/linuxbios.elf^H ^H^H ^Hlf
Drive 4 does not exist
boot: hde1:/linuxbios.elf
---------------------------

This is only a problem for a cold boot, i.e. from power off. If I do a warm
reboot, the system boots fine.

Is there something that can be done about this? It seems silly to have to
introduce delays in the bootup sequence to make booting from SATA possible,
particularly since fast bootup is one of LinuxBIOS's strengths.

Thanks,
Ward.

-- 
Ward Vandewege <ward at fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation - Senior System Administrator