Hello Ron, >> I have the m810lmr (SiS) board and it needs about 12 seconds >> to exec init process with a Duron 950 MHz and 512MB ram.
RGM> This may be due to the way we turn on the CPU. The loading of the kernel RGM> is done when the CPU is still running slowly. Do you mean, that you can influence the speed of the cpu ? I asked some time ago, for FSB, cpu voltage and multiplier configuration. Is this what you mean or did I miss the point ? Ooops. I think you mean that my init process takes 12 seconds. NO. I meant that the complete boot process from power on to init process (init process itself excluded) needs this time. >> Do you reach the 3 seconds with actual boards, or was it >> with the good old small 2.2.x kernel, some time ago ? RGM> No, I see this today even now with the 2.4.x kernel and a winfast 6300 RGM> with a 600 Mhz. Celeron. Also on ASUS with a PIII. AMD really handicapped RGM> themselves for linuxbios and we're just now straightening that out. What configuration do you use for that ? - special kernel configs - linuxbios config - serial console turned off - all drivers as modules - what drivers are compiled in - no init process - ide disabled >> Can you give some general tips about optimizing the bootup >> time ? RGM> One thing that I think we need to do: find a way to fix up /etc/rc RGM> scripts. RGM> I have traced /etc/rc startup. Very little of the time is spent running RGM> things. A lot of the time is spent source files so that a script can RGM> decide it DOES NOT need to run. It is a very inefficient system. On one RGM> system I measured, all the scripts that ran and files that were opened RGM> (hundreds of them) resulted in the execution of 12 commands. RGM> You should be able to start up from init to login in < 1 second with an RGM> efficient rc scheme. That's the big time consumer right now. Init process is not the problem. I don't know exactly how long it takes, but I used some simplified rc scripts from redhat linux where I stripped out some things. I am using busybox, uClibc and some more tools working with uClibc. For my project I don't need a complex rc startup system. I only need my hardware driver and user mode software, network and filesystems. That can be loaded easily in about 1 second. What is the minimum of compiled-in drivers for booting from DoC (DoC itself (for /dev/nftla), filesystem, ...) ? Stefan
