[OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

Fri Feb 5 22:16:36 UTC 2021

On 2021-02-05 13:46, Toomas Soome wrote:
>> On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris <oidev at sunos.info> wrote:
>> 
>> On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:
>>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris <oidev at sunos.info> wrote:
>>>> On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:
>>>>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris <oidev at sunos.info> wrote:
>>>>>> On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris <oidev at sunos.info> wrote:
>>>>>>>> On 2021-01-29 17:18, Andy Fiddaman wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On Fri, 29 Jan 2021, Chris wrote:
>>>>>>>>> ; OK just dragged a Dell Optiplex 790 off the shelf
>>>>>>>>> ; with a 4 core 8 thread i5 CPU in it, and as much RAM
>>>>>>>>> ; as I could jam in it.
>>>>>>>>> ; BIOS:
>>>>>>>>> ; boot UEFI
>>>>>>>>> ; SATA ahci
>>>>>>>>> ; I've tried 2 different Nvidia cards, as well as the
>>>>>>>>> ; intermal video. The results are the same;
>>>>>>>>> ; 2.5 minutes to get to the OI banner/boot options.
>>>>>>>>> ; An additiona 3.5 to draw the OI banner/options screen.
>>>>>>>>> ; It takes ~0.5 seconds to draw each cell. To be clear;
>>>>>>>>> ; I'm not complaining here. Rather, I'm trying to
>>>>>>>>> ; pinpoint WTF is going wrong in hopes of overcoming
>>>>>>>>> ; the problem. I've attempted to put OI on 3 different
>>>>>>>>> ; computers now, and the results have all been
>>>>>>>>> ; underwhelming in the console dept.
>>>>>>>>> ;
>>>>>>>>> ; Any thoughts?
>>>>>>>>> If you can press <escape> really early in the boot process, you get 
>>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>>> first loader prompt (I forget exactly how it looks). At that point,
>>>>>>>>> enter "-t" without the quotes and press return. That will keep in
>>>>>>>>> VGA mode, which might well be faster/usable.
>>>>>>>> Huge thanks for the reply, Andy!
>>>>>>>> Yes, it made a difference. Drawing each cell only takes 0.25
>>>>>>>> seconds. :-P
>>>>>>>> So somewhat faster, anyway. It's funny. It starts out quite
>>>>>>>> fast. The speed I normally experience with other stuff. It
>>>>>>>> writes
>>>>>>>> Available consoles:
>>>>>>>> text VGA ...
>>>>>>>> ttya port 0x3f8
>>>>>>>> ttyb ... not present
>>>>>>>> ttyc ... not present
>>>>>>>> ttyd ... not present
>>>>>>>> null software device
>>>>>>>> spin software device
>>>>>>>> Right at this point is where it drops to about 1/2 or slower speed.
>>>>>>>> Then, cell by cell, it prints
>>>>>>>> console ttyb failed to initialize
>>>>>>>> console ttyc failed to initialize
>>>>>>>> console ttyd failed to initialize
>>>>>>> This is the point where you have got hint about why this happens. The 
>>>>>>> same defect
>>>>>>> is with virtualbox, when you have configured host pipe for serial 
>>>>>>> device.
>>>>>>> The three lines above tell us that ttya was successfully initialized, 
>>>>>>> so it must
>>>>>>> have to do about ttya.
>>>>>> OK I neglected to note that this was including the advice by Andy to 
>>>>>> drop to
>>>>>> text mode, by interrupting loader, and entering -t at the prompt 
>>>>>> followed by
>>>>>> enter. It's clear that it was attempting serial mode -- note the port 
>>>>>> 0x3f8
>>>>>> Without interrupting loader, text and ttya return:
>>>>>> text VESA (800x600 - 1600x1200 depending on what I'm hooked up to)
>>>>>> ttya ... not present
>>>>>> I'm attempting it again via Legacy where
>>>>>> text VESA 1600x1200
>>>>>> ttya ... not present
>>>>>> Choosing 5 (options), followed by 5 (verbose) has already taken 20
>>>>>> minutes (it's still in progress). I think I'm just going to try to
>>>>>> install it and work on it further from the internal disk. In hopes
>>>>>> of getting at least a small speed increase from 0 to actual boot.
>>>>>> I greatly appreciate your insight on this, Toomas.
>>>>> Ok, so this guess was not good one afterall. If you are doing CD (ISO) 
>>>>> boot, you
>>>>> will get loader started as first stage - that is, there is no way to 
>>>>> enter
>>>>> options; however, once you get out of menu and on O prompt, you can 
>>>>> enter:
>>>>> framebuffer off
>>>>> on BIOS boot, this will switch to VGA text mode, on UEFI, it will switch 
>>>>> terminal
>>>>> draw from GOP Blt() to SimpleTextOutput protocol (gfx can not be 
>>>>> switched off as
>>>>> there is no VGA text mode in UEFI, there may not be even VGA).
>>>>> If you are booting from USB stick, press space on very first spinner to 
>>>>> get boot:
>>>>> prompt, from there you can enter: -t as Andy was suggesting, it will 
>>>>> start loader
>>>>> in text mode, without switching to VBE framebuffer. Once the OS is 
>>>>> installed, you
>>>>> can create /boot/config with -t in it, this will achieve the same 
>>>>> effect.
>>>>> That much about workaround.
>>>>> “normally”, if drawing in FB mode is slow, it will help to use lower 
>>>>> resolution
>>>>> and/or depth, but as you wrote, 800x600 was just as bad as 1920x1200, it 
>>>>> means
>>>>> something else is going on there.
>>>>> You can set mode as: framebuffer set XxY[xD], where D is for depth, 
>>>>> defaults to
>>>>> 32, if not present. framebuffer list [depth] will list available modes. 
>>>>> With BIOS
>>>>> mode, you can also try something like 640x400 or 640x480, below that the 
>>>>> terminal
>>>>> will get too weird even with 6x12 font...
>>>>> If depth 8 or 15/16 does not make it faster, it still means there is 
>>>>> something
>>>>> weird going on, and at this point, I’d suggest to check if there is 
>>>>> firmware
>>>>> update from vendor. (tbh, firmware update would be good as first check, 
>>>>> the hw
>>>>> vendors are known to produce a lot of bad things, especially if it comes 
>>>>> to have
>>>>> bios emulation with uefi csm.).
>>>> Sure. Good point. But already updated it. You've given me some things to 
>>>> poke at.
>>>> I'll give them a try, and see if anything interesting develops.
>>>> Thank you very much for taking the time, Toomas. Greatly appreciated!
>>> Well, I wrote that stuff;)
>> You seemed like a nice person. It's a pity I have to hate you now for
>> doing that. ;-)
>> 
>> Seriously tho. After some 5 days now poking at this, and only getting 
>> marginal
>> improvements via different framebuffer settings (BTW how does one make a
>> framebuffer setting stick from boot to boot?).
> 
> add framebuffer set … to /boot/loader.rc.local
Thank you. I think you may have already told me that too. Sorry.
But TBH, the differences are negligible. So I think my time is probably
better spent tracking down the cause. :-)
> 
>> It occurred to me that I didn't recall having any of these problems on 
>> earlier
>> SunOS/Solaris, or Illumos/OI installs. So I decided to walk back in 
>> history,
>> and see if I could discover where the problem left/started. So, always 
>> choosing
>> text install images, I went from OI-hipster-text-20201031.usb, to
>> OI-hipster-text-20200504.usb, to OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb, and BINGO!
>> Everything worked perfectly. The time to the boot options menu/banner was
>> *instantaneous*. So I figured I'd simply walk the commits going forward to
>> discover what introduced the slow screen writes.
> 
> 
> hm, that is interesting finding.
> 
>> 
>> On OI-hipster-text-20201031.usb:
>> % time ls --color=force -Cla /usr/include/
>> took 22.4s
>> 
>> On OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb:
>> % time ls --color=force -Cla /usr/include/
>> 0.000u  8.270s  0:08.28  99.8%
>> That's 3 times faster!
>> 
>> Finding that many of the tools I need weren't available because I needed
>> to bootstrap a newer version of pkg. I did the unthinkable, and issued
>> pkg update -v
>> Which of course required a reboot into the new environment. The results
>> of the new environment was unrewarding. Getting to the boot options
>> menu/banner screen took nearly 9 minutes. Now I'm back to square 0. :-(
>> Altho illumos-3c2328bf3b:
>> % time ls --color=force -Cla /usr/include/
>> 0.008u  8.999s  0:09.11  98.6%
>> Which is *technically* slower. The difference is negligible for sure.
> 
> 
> That's just two samples, you need more to draw conclusions:)
I only _post_ 2 samples. I must have towards 50. But they were
close enough to simply pick the first in these 2 installs. :-)
> 
> 
>> But the fonts don't seem as smooth. In all cases the EDID was read
>> correctly (1920x1200 @32bpp). OH and if it matters, it's on an Intel
>> chipset (Intel video).
>> 
>> Time to (re)install OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb and start over.
>> 
>> Any thoughts? Best places to look? I'd love to shorten the timeline
>> to a (correctly) working install of OI. 7 days and counting.
> 
> Is it BIOS or UEFI setup? if bios, then all you need is to copy /boot/loader 
> from
> older BE (beadm mount OLD /mnt; cp, then beadm umount). Just in case, make 
> copy of
> existing one.
Thanks! Good idea. I could probably choose the previous env from the loader,
and mark it default.
> 
> But, there are few things to keep in mind.
> 
> loader and kernel console draw are different things, the ls itself got some 
> fixes recently.
> 
> So, is the performance degradation actually hitting only loader?
> 
> Can you please mail me output from: tr '\0' '\n' < /system/boot/environment
Will do.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Toomas! :-)
> 
> thanks,
> toomas
--Chris

-- 
~10yrs a FreeBSD maintainer of ~160 ports
~40yrs of UNIX