[coreboot] How to improve the boot time of the Asus KGPE-D16?

[Timothy Pearson]

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On 03/02/2017 01:30 PM, Arthur Heymans wrote:
> Paul Menzel via coreboot <coreboot at coreboot.org> writes:
> 
> 
>> I think most of the time is spent in RAM initialization.
>>
>>    1. Do board owners with similar amount of memory (independent of the
>>       board) have similar numbers?
>>    2. What are the ways to improve that? Is it possible? For example, can
>>       the modules be probed in parallel (if that isn’t done already)?
>>
> I'm not the right person to answer this since I don't know this
> code/hardware that well, but on modern Intel hardware native code uses
> the MRC cache to store dram training results and restore those on
> next boots (and resume from suspend) if no change in dimm configuration
> was detected.
> 
> Maybe something like this could also be applied here (or maybe it's already
> the case since it includes code to access spi flash)?

Yes, this is already implemented as an option, and it does a fairly
decent job of reducing training overhead to almost nothing, but the ECC
clear overhead remains.  Ideally both training and ECC clear would be
parallelized, but as before romstage is a very limited environment and
I'm not sure the cost / benefit ratio is there to implement this feature
right now.  I'd feel somewhat more confident if there was more support
for parallel tasking in coreboot in general, instead of having to create
a northbridge-specific system like the old K8 raminit.

- -- 
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
+1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line)
+1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard)
https://www.raptorengineering.com
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