One thing I'll certainly work on in the upcoming weeks is boot time improvement.
So far, booting takes quite a long time. But instead of looking at my clock when powering up my FreeRunner,
I installed a tool to go deeper in the boot process and analyse its (non-)performance.
This tool is called Bootchart-lite, a clone of the well known Bootchart on desktop systems.
That's a basic rewrite from embedded systems that create similar logs as its big brother bootchart, meaning bootchart can compute them.
If you are interested in working on boot time improvement, you should install it !
Uboot configuration
The bootloader must be configured to add a kernel parameter. Here is the way for Uboot. Adapt it for Qi if you use it.
# apt-get install fso-utils # from FSO
# mkdir /tmp/uboot && cd /tmp/uboot
# dfu-util -a u-boot_env -U env.u-boot
# uboot-envedit -i env.u-boot -p > env_modified.u-boot.tx
Edit env_modified.u-boot.txt to tell the kernel to use bootchart-lite instead of init as first process.
boot_menu_timeout=300
bootargs_base=rootfstype=jffs2 root=/dev/mtdblock6 quiet bootlevel=8 init=/usr/bin/bootchart-lite console=ttySAC2,115200 console=tty0 loglevel=8 regular_boot
...
# uboot-envedit -i env.u-boot -f env_modified.u-boot.txt -o env_modified.u-boot
# dfu-util -a u-boot_env -D env_modified.u-boot
* Install the packages *
On your FreeRunner running Hackable:1, install bootchart-lite: (As of september, 18, it is packaged for daily builds, and will be packaged for rev5)
hackable1# apt-get install bootchart-lite
hackable1# reboot
Get data and render the image
On your computer, install bootchart-view (from the big brother bootchart project), and get the logs.
Then, render the PNG (or SVG) image.
# apt-get install bootchart-view
$ scp -r root@hackable1:/etc/bootchart-lite .
$ cd bootchart-lite
$ tar czf bootchart.tgz *.log
$ bootchart -f png bootchart.tgz
Analysis
That's the most difficult step :) !
I'll have a look on that later, I'm focusing on rev5 for now.
Eh ! There are "beta2" images available on http://build.hackable1.org. Would you give it a try ?
Please let us know how you like it and if bugs remain !
