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Re: [ts-7000] Internal Flash vs microSD boot speed

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Subject: Re: [ts-7000] Internal Flash vs microSD boot speed
From: Jim Ham <>
Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 08:36:43 -0800
See below.
leaton wrote:
>   I have successfully ported functionality and code from the TS7390
> to the TS8390+TS4700. I am very impressed with the performance of
> the new boards.
>   In my old setup with the TS7390 the board took approximately 90 seconds
> to boot, configure X windows system, configure the network, and start
> my graphics application. This did not vary appreciably when booting
> from internal flash or SD card.
>
>   I see much quicker boot times on the new board set, as I mentioned.
> However, it is incredibly fast when booting from microSD card -
 > approximately 20 seconds. What puzzles me is that when booting from
> internal flash, it takes over twice as long, anywhere from 45 seconds
> to 60 seconds. The variability seems to be how long it takes to mount
> the internal flash 'big root.' I can live with this.
>
>   But why, discounting the mount time, does it actually take twice as
> long to go through the booting motions? I think it actually just runs
> slower in general when running from internal flash vs microSD.
>
>   I spent considerable time making sure the boot procedure is as close to 
> exactly the same as possible.
>
> Anyone have any ideas?
>
I have no answers to your question, but I can supply another data point 
for booting the 4700+8390.

I have an application that does direct writes to X, no window manager, 
no toolkit. When running it includes a full X server and client, an HTTP 
server, a FTP server, an SSH client and a NFS client. From power-on to 
this application appearing on the screen is about 9-10 seconds. I see no 
difference booting from xnand or from the microSD card.

The boot sequence (all from xnand) is: 1)reading the kernel from 
partition 1, 2) reading and executing the initrd from partition 2, then 
3) executing init on partition 3. Nothing special here. I do have a 
custom kernel that has all of the modules needed at boot time built in.

What made all the difference for me is using a custom distribution 
instead of using the Debian. Check out Buildroot - it is a awesome tool. 
<http://buildroot.org/> One specifies the files needed with a tool that 
is just like the one you use to customize the kernel. Once specified, 
start it up ("make") and walk away for 1/2 hour. In my case the 
resulting file system only uses about 180M out of the 256M available. 
Nice. Did I mention that it includes samba (not woken up yet) and gdb? 
Of course it relies heavily on busybox. I elected to include splashy, so 
I get a splash screen with a progress bar for 8 out of the 10 seconds it 
takes to boot.

I elected not to use SYSV init. There are no runlevels. init just runs 
though all the init files in /etc/init.d.

It certainly works for me. The same application running on our previous 
platform took about 90 seconds to boot. It used an xscale running at 400MHz.

Jim
-- 
Porcine Associates LLC
244 O'Connor St.
Menlo Park, CA 94025
USA
+1(650)326-2669 fax +1(650)326-1071


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