Re: New fast(?)-boot results on ARM

[Artem Bityutskiy]

On 08/15/2009 12:35 AM, Zan Lynx wrote:
> Linus Walleij wrote:
> > 2009/8/14 Robert Schwebel <r.schwebel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> > > On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 12:19:48PM -0600, Zan Lynx wrote:
> >
> > > > > That's factor 70 away from the 110 ms boot time Tim has talked about
> > > > > some days ago (and he measured on an ARM cpu which had almost half
> > > > > the speed of this one), and I'm wondering what we can do to improve
> > > > > the boot time.
> > > > 2.4s in uncompression? That seems like an obvious target for
> > > > improvement.
> > > Indeed, we'll check that.
> >
> > We got rid of uncompression on a flash-based system vastly improving
> > boot time. The reason is that compressed kernels are faster only when
> > the throughput to the persistent storage is lower than the decompression
> > throughput, and on typical embedded systems with DMA the throughput to
> > memory outperforms the CPU-based decompression.
>
> I thought of another thing to check related to slow decompression. If
> the kernel, bootloader or hardware is in charge of setting CPU power and
> speed scaling, then you should check that it boots with the CPU set at
> maximum speed instead of slowest.

zlib is slow on decompression, and lzo is much faster. So if you implement
lzo compression, you'll probably speed things up a little as well. I saw
some discussions about this on lkml. Having no compression at all may also
be a good thing to try.

--
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (ÐÑÑÑÐ ÐÐÑÑÑÐÐÐ)
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