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#181980 - 29/09/2003 20:56 Embedded Linux booting in under 200ms
cushman
veteran

Registered: 21/01/2002
Posts: 1380
Loc: Erie, CO
There was an article on Slashdot about this, basically some dudes got linux to boot in under 200ms. Thinking at least some of this could be applied to the Empeg anyway.
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Mark Cushman

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#181981 - 29/09/2003 21:05 Re: Embedded Linux booting in under 200ms [Re: cushman]
tman
carpal tunnel

Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
From what the LinuxBIOS people have done in the past, I'd say it's not that much of an amazing achievement. Most of the speed increase seems to be due to them ripping out hardware detection and removing IDE support. Also it's 200ms to get the kernel loaded and running, it doesn't mean your application is actually running at this point.

Probing the IDE interface takes a few seconds and you have to wait for drives to spin up and initialise before they'll properly respond.
As it's an embedded platform they're targeting, then they can hardwire the configuration so they don't need to do any detection of available RAM, working out how fast the processor is etc...

Okay, you could do the last part on the empeg but you can't really take out the IDE interface code for obvious reasons

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#181982 - 29/09/2003 21:13 Re: Embedded Linux booting in under 200ms [Re: tman]
mlord
carpal tunnel

Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14491
Loc: Canada
The IDE code on the empeg doesn't really slow it down more than a second or so, if that. Mostly because the empeg NEEDS the IDE drives up and spinning in order to load it's software! So it's gotta wait regardless.

But wait, you say, it doesn't need to wait for a second drive in a single-drive player, right? RIGHT! That's why there's a Hijack menu item specifically for that situation.

-ml

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#181983 - 30/09/2003 02:26 Re: Embedded Linux booting in under 200ms [Re: mlord]
Roger
carpal tunnel

Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
But wait, you say, it doesn't need to wait for a second drive in a single-drive player, right?

With a bit (a lot?) more trickery, it might not have to wait for the second drive in a two drive system, until it actually needs to load some music from it.
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-- roger

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