Greetings,
I have seen the long transfers myself. Much of the time involved appears to be
caused by the default in.tftpd server when a transfer is initiated. Since
kernel, ramdisk, and command line are 3 seperate transfers, it adds up. A nicer
standalone server should help a great deal. I will be trying that next week
(with the servers from the etherboot site).
It may also be possable to speed things up by pre-requesting the next block and
counting on gunzip to request it before the NIC's buffer can overflow with other
traffic. For the first pass, I wanted to avoid any clever but potentially
failure prone tricks. For a second pass, as long as the card is taken out of
promiscuous mode, it should have no problems at all with that.
G'day,
sjames
Quoting "Eric W. Biederman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > you really can see the difference in performance from polling-driven
> > tftpboot and moving the files over a tcp socket from linux. To move a
> 1 MB
> > kernel file down via linux (booted from flash from linuxbios) over
> > 100baseT over tcp takes so little time you can't even see it. Big
> send
> > windows are a good deal. Moving the same 1MB file down over tftp via
> > polling driver takes a noticeable amount of time.
>
> Ron please give an approximation how long each takes.
>
> TFTP may not be the fastest horse in the race but my experience
> has been that the transfer speed is not so slow as to be unacceptable.
> For myself the transfer time is generally under a second.
>
> If you are getting worse times than that I'd like to hear about it.
>
> Basically my experience has been that TFTP is some faster than reading
> a kernel directly from flash.
>
> > Which is to say, we are stuck with tftp for the 256KB case, but with
> 512KB
> > or more we're better off booting linux from flash when possible and
> > running a high performance protocol. (We've come full circle: that's
> one
> > reason we started this project ...)
>
> Ron you may be right but it doesn't feel right to me.
>
> If your TFTP times are really slow you might want to try reusing
> etherboot itself. Instead of a hacked up version in linuxBIOS.
>
> Once I get a moment I can probably try the other direction, and port
> the embedded etherboot to my motherboard. But since I'll be switching
> drivers, timers and a few other things I am dubious about reproducing
> your problem.
>
> > Next thing to figure out: where's the bloat in Linux? time for a
> > look.
>
> The bloat is well scattered, and non-trivial to reduce. With a
> practically empty config I was able to make a little progress, but not
> enough to be satisfying.
>
> Eric
>
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