Re: [gentoo-embedded] Embedded NaiKit For Sale

[Ed W]

Peter Stuge wrote:
>
>> Not critiquing, but I need a smallish board for an embedded
>> mailserver project and have looked around for various things which
>> fit the bill.
>> Alix seems best bang for buck so far?
>>
>
> Depends on your planned traffic load. The Geode LX is cool and all,
> and has decent performance, but it is in no way a throughput monster.
>
> <shameless plug>
> If you're going to get an ALIX board I can recommend replacing the
> BIOS with coreboot for a completely open source system. There is good
> support for a few ALIX boards. http://coreboot.org/
> </plug>
>

Ohh cool! I didn't know of that!

Actually you raise an interesting question - for this project it's a 
very low use box, just for a couple of users, but I want as fast boot 
time as possible.  Right now I just a basic 2.6 kernel (recommended 
.config file appreciated if anyone has any optimisations for Geode - 
mine if fairly pared down already though), but it's taking a good 10-15 
seconds to boot the kernel which seems quite a bit longer than I would 
have expected?  It seems to spend quite a bit of time initialising 
hardware (not yet spent any time working on this though - possibly I 
still have too much compiled into the kernel.)

If anyone has any notes on increasing kernel boot speed I would be 
interested in links.  There are some very old notes on the IBM site 
somewhere, but they seem too far out of date to be terribly useful.  I 
don't need sub second boot speeds, but it would be useful to get some 
idea where the boot time goes?  Does coreboot have anything to help me 
get the kernel up faster?

For reference I'm talking about before where I think bootchart helps, 
but actually how to get the kernel to initialise faster.  As an aside, I 
haven't tried baselayout2+openrc on these Alix boards yet, but on my 
main (normal) machines OpenRC transforms the boot times to just a few 
seconds - very impressive


Cheers

Ed W