[coreboot] Timing via serial port

[Mart Raudsepp]

On L, 2009-04-18 at 23:05 -0400, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 09:14:06PM -0400, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> > The biggest SeaBIOS time consumers:
> [...]
> > 425ms - scanning for option roms
> 
> I tracked this one down - it's the cost of CBFS and reading the flash.
> Of the 425ms, 90ms is spent copying the via vga rom.  The remaining
> time is spent doing CBFS searches - there are 18 pci devices on this
> machine and for each one SeaBIOS scans CBFS for "pciVVVV,DDDD.rom".
> Because none of these files were actually present, SeaBIOS ended up
> walking all the flash freespace each time.  All those flash accesses
> add up.

Is there no zero-fill with cbfs?
With LAR if I don't zero-fill (add a dummy entry to fill up the
remaining space, the content is actually 0xFF's despite the term) it
will also walk all the flash free space.
Observing roughly 1 sec vs 4 sec boot times with and without zero-fill -
I need to make a proper measurement, and this kind of tools that you and
Peter have written were exactly what I was missing for doing that!

In coreboot-v3 there's a Kconfig option to zero-fill, but as I have to
manually add the Geode VSA blob, I have that disabled and do it manually
as described in http://www.coreboot.org/Artec_Group_DBE62
However I don't think zero-fill was even the default option in v3.

Maybe you can do zero-fill entry for cbfs too similarly.
I believe Carl-Daniel mentioned CBFS doesn't fix that problem either and
shares the gotcha with LAR at the moment still.


Regards,
Mart Raudsepp

> > 260ms - initializing ATA drives
> 
> I wonder if I can skip the ATA reset on the first boot - the device
> should have just gone through a hw reset anyway...
> 
> -Kevin