[coreboot] slow load times

Myles Watson mylesgw at gmail.com
Wed Feb 18 03:51:46 CET 2009



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kevin O'Connor [mailto:kevin at koconnor.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 5:41 PM
> To: Myles Watson
> Cc: coreboot at coreboot.org
> Subject: Re: [coreboot] slow load times
> 
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 09:50:02AM -0700, Myles Watson wrote:
> > > If you send the full log, maybe it will help diagnose that problem.
> >
> > I've attached 3 logs.  booted is from cold boot and was successful.
> > ctrl-alt-del and ctrl-alt-del2 were my attempts to reboot during
> > SeaBIOS.  One time it hung the machine, the other time it didn't seem
> > to do much.  When it fails, the SeaBIOS part looks the same, but I get
> > this at boot time, sometimes followed by kernel a panic.
> >
> > [    6.832316] ata5.00: ATAPI: _NEC DVD_RW ND-3540A, 1.01, max UDMA/33
> > [   11.836055] ata5.01: qc timeout (cmd 0xf8)
> 
> What version of SeaBIOS did you try?  Over the weekend, I commited
> f358759fb which fixed a problem with the RTC not being reset during
> ctrl+alt+delete.  Your ctrl-alt-del2 log is similar to what I was
> seeing.

I didn't realize that you updated it.  I'll try getting the latest.

> The other two logs look like drive failures.  I suppose your drives
> could be getting seriously confused when SeaBIOS tries to read/write
> to them while they are reporting BSY.  Were these failures before you
> applied the await_not_bsy(iobase1) patch?

No, they were after.  

> > >         // Look for device
> > > +        await_not_bsy(iobase1);
> > >         outb(slave ? ATA_CB_DH_DEV1 : ATA_CB_DH_DEV0,
> iobase1+ATA_CB_DH);
> > > +        await_not_bsy(iobase1);
> 
> > This patch makes it wait for the controllers to initialize.  It works
> > sometimes from cold boot now!
> 
> Does it work consistently?  If it still fails sometimes I'm confused
> on what it could be.

I'm not sure either.  It's strange that SeaBIOS can load grub, but the
kernel is confused later.  Once it gets to the confused state, the factory
kernel has to be loaded.  A cold reboot isn't sufficient.

Thanks,
Myles





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