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

Fri Feb 5 23:41:00 UTC 2021

On 2021-02-05 14:16, Chris wrote:
> 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! :-)
OK we have a winner! Thanks to some advice from Toomas:
adding: console=text to /boot/conf.d/console
which I later moved to /boot/loader.conf.local (console="text")
followed by commenting the console= line from /boot/default/loader.conf
I now have speed to boot menu that is close to the
OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb install I mentioned earlier in this thread.
While the screen still isn't as fast as the other some half dozen OSs
I use. It's not so slow I can't work with it. :-)
So a HUGE thanks go out to everyone here on the list, that chimed in
to help out -- THANK YOU! :-)

@moderator
Please mark this solved. ;-)

All the best.

--Chris

>> 
>> thanks,
>> toomas
> --Chris

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