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

[Toomas Soome]

> On 6. Feb 2021, at 01:44, Joshua M. Clulow via openindiana-discuss <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 5 Feb 2021 at 15:40, Chris <oidev at sunos.info> wrote:
>>> 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! :-)
> 
> Does that mean loader is, on at least this machine, struggling with
> writes to a serial port which isn't there, perhaps?  (More concretely:
> why does that help?)
> 

It is the same defect we can observe with virtualbox; the machine (vm or physical) has serial port configured (ttya in this case), but not connected and polling this port is causing delays. With vbox you will get the same effect by setting pipe for serial port and enable that port for vm, but do not connect to another end..

This happens because of (mis)configured port or bios issues - if you do not use serial ports, it makes sense to disable them from machine setup (bios or VM), but also we still need some updates in this area.

We are testing the presence of serial port by writing byte to scratch register and reading it (see comc_setup in libi386/comconsole.c.

rgds,
toomas