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

Sat Feb 6 08:56:28 UTC 2021

> On 6. Feb 2021, at 01:41, Chris <oidev at sunos.info> wrote:
> 
> 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. ;-)
> 

The issue is still up, we do need better way to pick up serial config (ACPI SPCR); but workaround is good to have.

Note, you do not need to have console=text in config if you have commented out the /boot/defaults/loader.conf line; however, defaults will be replaced by next update.

rgds,
toomas

>>> thanks,
>>> toomas
>> --Chris
> 
> -- 
> ~10yrs a FreeBSD maintainer of ~160 ports
> ~40yrs of UNIX