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

[Toomas Soome]

> 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;)

rgds,
toomas