[coreboot] "How come it's so slow?"

[Darmawan Salihun]

I think every UEFI/EFI implementation will boot to "old school" boot
mode when it can't find any EFI/UEFI-compliant
boot-device/boot-partition. It would take too long though but at least
the fallback is there.

-Darmawan

On 3/9/10, Ed Swierk <eswierk at aristanetworks.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:58 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Just got a new nehalem box in for test yesterday. Experiences so far:
>>
>> 1. POST from power-on takes 45 seconds. *45 SECONDS*. Now, I had it
>> said to me at SCALE7x last year from someone from Intel that all new
>> BIOSes on Intel chips are really EFI underneath -- is this indicative
>> of what we are to expect? If so, it's awful. It's 15 times slower than
>> what we had ten years ago, and 50 times slower than what we can do
>> today on coreboot.
>
> As far as I can tell the sole purpose of EFI is to make it easier for
> hardware vendors to shovel more junk into the BIOS by removing the
> hurdle of hand-coding 16-bit assembly.
>
> But while EFI might accelerate the trend, it's not the only villain.
> Someone noticed a 9x growth in boot time on qemu recently
> (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-03/msg00546.html ).
> Even on a virtual platform with no actual hardware to initialize, boot
> time will grow unless someone is actively pushing the other way.
>
> Ultimately the system board vendors are responsible for the BIOS in
> the boards we buy. They are the ones cutting deals with Intel and AMI
> and Phoenix, and can exert the necessary leverage. But they won't,
> until they see 1-second cold boot as a feature that will sell more
> boards.
>
> --Ed
>
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> coreboot mailing list: coreboot at coreboot.org
> http://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
>


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