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

[Chris]

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!
> 
> rgds,
> toomas

--Chris
> 
>>> If you comment out (I am assuming you have installed OS) the line:
>>> console="text, ttya, ttyb, ttyc, ttyd”
>>> from /boot/defaults/loader.conf, you will probably find the console is 
>>> much better.
>>> rgds,
>>> toomas
>> --Chris
>>>> 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

-- 
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~40yrs of UNIX