Re: [9fans] booting a 9 pc without using any disk nor a prom burner

[ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 matt@proweb.co.uk wrote:

> yeah, 14 seconds sounds like an age
>
> my bsd from CF isn't much more than that before it's playing mp3s from
> the cdrom

Is that bsd from CF doing a full general-purpose boot, or is it
specialized to being an mp3 player?

I'm still trying to work out the timing. This may in part be slowness of
the front end. But these ituners are only 533 mhz C3 so that could be part
of it too.

Plan 9 is up and running in 5 seconds. Then there's 5 seconds of "stuff"
until the time... message is printed, then four more seconds of "stuff".

Although I just did another boot and it took 10 seconds. Hmm. try again.
Yeah. 10 seconds again. and 10 seconds again. And again. Hmm.

OK, one factor is that the console is at 19.2KB, and etherboot prints a
'.' every block of loading from flash. This can add to time. Etherboot has
a timeout for a prompt, more time lost. So the first 5 seconds is clearly
interactive overhead in etherboot losing time. But Plan 9 is definitely up
and running at the 5 second mark.

The time from 'Plan 9 start' to 'Plan 9 cpu prompt' varies a lot. If it is
done a lot, then it goes to about 5 seconds. If you have not done it for a
while, it takes more like 9 seconds. I blame the laptop I'm using as the
auth/fs/whatever server.

ron