Re: simple task to speed up booting

On Monday, December 22, 2014 12:05:43 am Ian Lepore wrote:
> On Sun, 2014-12-14 at 10:32 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> > The rotating swirlie ('-/|\') in the loader accounts for a surprisingly
> > large part of our boot time on systems with slow-ish serial consoles.
> > 
> > I think right now it takes a step for each 512 byte read, reducing that
> > to once every 64kB or even 1MB would be an improvement with the kind of
> > kernel sizes we have today.
> > 
> 
> I investigated this a bit today.  I instrumented the loader on arm to
> count how many times twiddle() is called while loading a 5.5MB kernel.
> When loading over NFS it was called 5580 times.  When loading from an
> sdcard it was called 284 times.
> 
> Poking around in the code, it looks like NFS calls twiddle() once per 1K
> block read, CD9660 once per 2K block, and UFS and ext2fs once per
> filesystem blocksize block.  All of them have some other scattered
> twiddle calls while navigating metadata that probably don't add up to
> much compared to the bulk reading.
> 
> My amd64 kernel is twice as big even with lots of the generic devices
> removed; that's a lot of IO.  But one twiddle per filesystem block
> shouldn't be so bad... let's call it 600 twiddles, each one writes 2
> bytes to serial, so a total of ~1200mS at 9600bps.  The same kernel
> loaded over nfs would cost over 20 seconds in serial output.
> 
> So all in all it seems like different kinds of IO need different
> throttling, something like the attached (which also still has some stats
> output in it).  I can't decide if it's worth committing... it'll have a
> lot of value to someone with slow serial and netbooting, is that common?

9600 consoles are still fairly common, so if this makes a noticable difference 
for NFS, by all means test it and get it in.

-- 
John Baldwin