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

[Chris]

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

Then clears the screen to draw the OI banner, and boot options.
Which takes even longer.

Not sure where to look from here. But I really appreciate your
chiming in, Andy.

Thanks!

--Chris

> 
> Andy
> 
> 

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