[OpenBIOS] yeeee ha!

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Erwin Rol wrote:

> What times are we talking about ?

really slow!
> Could you give any benchmarks ? like how long it takes from turning on
> the
> computer until init is called ?

right now the gunzip step takes up to ONE MINUTE. I've got something set
up wrong, and I hear that there is a needed step in the PII to make it
"run fast". It seems to be running at 8086 speeds ...

> 
> It would be _very_ interesting to have a (custom) init running within 2
> second or less
> after powerup, could you see this happening ? 

I think it is possible.

The big issue is bandwidth to the NVRAM. You need to suck 512K out of the
NVRAM. If the NVRAM has 1 MB/sec bandwidth, this step takes 1/2 second. If
we had 16 MB/second nvram, then obviously we're faster. 

Sad to say, there's only an 8-bit path to NVRAM. And flash is slow. This
is a long-term problem. 

The faster the NVRAM, the better. 

> (of course that will exclude slow starting things like SCSI controlers
> and the like,
> and no auto probing , everything preconfigured in the kernel)

>From what I'm seeing the scsi is slow but not terrible. The scsi bioses
stink, though.

ron
p.s. my goal for a cluster node is cold boot in 7 seconds, reboot in 5
seconds. I think it's quite possible.

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