Deliverable 4: Proposed boot process is available for review (SoC2006)

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> So when using the debian kernels and i386 hardware, it seem safe
> enough to not use the hwclock*.sh scripts during boot and shutdown.

No, it is not even remotely safe for all i386 hardware.

It is *probably* safe for all i586 and better hardware, but Debian kernels
have the RTC as a module.  That thing can fire up in the middle of a
parallel boot because we are doing things half-assed in the early userspace
setup right now (and I do not mean with the parallel boot complexity added
in).

> And this do have a huge impact on the boot speed, at least for the one
> I benchmarked today.  16 seconds off a 44 second boot is 36 %. :)

Yeah, it is a very nice optimization to do when you know it is safe.  But it
is not one I'd ever enable for the general case, not even just in the i386
arch.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh