> >> The interesting quirk here for me is that the time from grub boot menu > >> selection to SunOS banner from *an actual CD* is about 30 seconds while > >> the time for a USB image is about 2 minutes. > >> > >> Is a CD drive that much faster at transferring the initial ramdisk than > >> a USB stick? > > > > Yes, that's possible. > > > > Esp. older systems seem to use USB 1.x transfers only, when > > booting from an USB storage device. > > > > Newer systems have "USB 2.0 High-Speed Boot" support and > > are able to boot *much* faster from USB storage devices. > > In this particular case, I verified that the device shows up as USB 2.0, > and the dmesg logs indicate that it is using "high-speed transfers." > > This is a fairly new Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (E8600?) system.
Where does it show up as USB 2.0? In Solaris? The BIOS should use USB 2.0. Are there any BIOS USB setup options, for EHCI or USB 2.0? I think this is a BIOS issue. I have bootable SX:CE and OpenSolaris on USB flash memory sticks, and the same stick boots in about 10 seconds from GRUB menu to SunOS banner on one machine, and needs a few minutes (IIRC ~ 2 minutes) on another box. During that boot phase, GRUB is reading the boot device using BIOS disk accesses. I don't think there's much that can be optimized from Solaris' side. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
