On 08/31/2010 12:13 PM, Andrew Murray wrote: > I have a suggestion for a kernel framework which aims to reduce boot > time in embedded devices and would be interested in hearing your > feedback. > > A large portion of kernel boot time is spent in driver probe functions > often waiting for hardware for example calculating LPJ values or > trying to determine what type of camera is connected (PAL/NTSC) etc. > However for most embedded devices the hardware remains constant and > these probes always determine the same information. Therefore boot > time can be decreased by removing some of this probe code and > replacing it with known values. > > To some extent some of these optimisations have already been done > through a variety of methods - for example the LPJ calculation can be > bypassed with the lpj= parameter and some drivers have their own > methods. My solution aims to generalise these solutions... > > The solution is to provide a very simple framework which will allow > drivers to identify and record such values (LPJ, camera type, decoder > chip version) during boot. Once booted the user can obtain a > collection of these values and pass them back to the kernel on > subsequent boots. During subsequent boots - drivers upon realising > these values have already been provided can bypass some of their probe > code and thus reducing boot time. Taking advantage of this framework > would be very trivial for drivers. > > I wanted to see your views on the overall solution prior to > considering how it could be implemented.
For my part, I think this sounds like a great idea. I have considered such a mechanism in the past, but never gotten around to actually designing a solution. Here are some random thoughts on this idea: My experience is that we've made good progress on boot time probing, for fixed hardware. The big problems in the kernel boot time appear to be with busses that require discovery of devices, with long timeouts specified in the bus standard and arbitrary bus connection architecture (I'm thinking of USB, but other busses have similar problems). For many embedded devices, scanning these types of pluggable busses aren't required for what I call "first product use", but they can be scanned and populated later. Note that the asynchronous function call stuff by Arjan van de Ven addresses some of this boot time probing delay problem. Having said that, I don't think that probing of static hardware is a solved problem, by any means. For the boot cache data, you are going to need to figure out how to make the data persistent. Doing something in a regular fashion (rather than ad-hoc via command line options) should help with this. To some degree this might end up looking very similar to the "resume" path in the driver, where a particular device state is entered into from cold start. Sony has been doing something related to this called "Snapshot boot" for some time now, which is kind of an optimized unhibernate operation, with some hardware bringup done by firmware, and some bringup done using the normal driver resume operation. This work was presented at OLS several years ago, but we haven't pushed it much since then. (But we're using it in product) See http://elinux.org/upload/3/37/Snapshot-boot-final.pdf Sorry for rambling. Anyway - I'm all for the boot cache idea. But acceptability would, of course, be dependent on the details of the implementation. The best thing to get started, IMHO, would be to identify a few drivers which have long probe times, and see how they could reduce these with the proposed boot cache. If you find that each new device adds some new wrinkle in the cache requirements, that would be a bad sign. But if different drivers, especially drivers in different functional areas, are found to be able to use a consistent API, then this could be a nice feature. BTW - I could see this tying into the flattened device tree work by Grant Likely. -- Tim P.S. Also, I would recommend cross-posting to LKML to get wider visibility of your proposal. I'm doing so in this response - I hope that's OK. ============================= Tim Bird Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment ============================= -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
