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

Artem Bityutskiy
2009-08-15T06:21:36Z

On 08/15/2009 12:35 AM, Zan Lynx wrote:
> Linus Walleij wrote:
>> 2009/8/14 Robert Schwebel <r.schwebel@pengutronix.de>:
>>> 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 (Артём Битюцкий)