[coreboot] "How come it's so slow?"

[Darmawan Salihun]

> On 3/9/10, Ed Swierk <eswierk at aristanetworks.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:58 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Just got a new nehalem box in for test yesterday. Experiences so far:
>>>
>>> 1. POST from power-on takes 45 seconds. *45 SECONDS*. Now, I had it
>>> said to me at SCALE7x last year from someone from Intel that all new
>>> BIOSes on Intel chips are really EFI underneath -- is this indicative
>>> of what we are to expect? If so, it's awful. It's 15 times slower than
>>> what we had ten years ago, and 50 times slower than what we can do
>>> today on coreboot.
>>
>> As far as I can tell the sole purpose of EFI is to make it easier for
>> hardware vendors to shovel more junk into the BIOS by removing the
>> hurdle of hand-coding 16-bit assembly.
>>
>> But while EFI might accelerate the trend, it's not the only villain.
>> Someone noticed a 9x growth in boot time on qemu recently
>> (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-03/msg00546.html ).
>> Even on a virtual platform with no actual hardware to initialize, boot
>> time will grow unless someone is actively pushing the other way.
>>
>> Ultimately the system board vendors are responsible for the BIOS in
>> the boards we buy. They are the ones cutting deals with Intel and AMI
>> and Phoenix, and can exert the necessary leverage. But they won't,
>> until they see 1-second cold boot as a feature that will sell more
>> boards.
>>
>> --Ed
>>

Sorry about the double post. Something went wrong with my mail client.

Anyway, perhaps these articles by vid is a nice addition:
http://x86asm.net/articles/introduction-to-uefi/index.html
http://x86asm.net/articles/uefi-programming-first-steps/index.html


-Darmawan
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