On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:
On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris <oi...@sunos.info> wrote:
On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:
On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris <oi...@sunos.info> wrote:
On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:
On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris <oi...@sunos.info> wrote:
On 2021-01-29 17:18, Andy Fiddaman wrote:
On Fri, 29 Jan 2021, Chris wrote:
; OK just dragged a Dell Optiplex 790 off the shelf
; with a 4 core 8 thread i5 CPU in it, and as much RAM
; as I could jam in it.
; BIOS:
; boot UEFI
; SATA ahci
; I've tried 2 different Nvidia cards, as well as the
; intermal video. The results are the same;
; 2.5 minutes to get to the OI banner/boot options.
; An additiona 3.5 to draw the OI banner/options screen.
; It takes ~0.5 seconds to draw each cell. To be clear;
; I'm not complaining here. Rather, I'm trying to
; pinpoint WTF is going wrong in hopes of overcoming
; the problem. I've attempted to put OI on 3 different
; computers now, and the results have all been
; underwhelming in the console dept.
;
; Any thoughts?
If you can press <escape> really early in the boot process, you get
the
first loader prompt (I forget exactly how it looks). At that point,
enter "-t" without the quotes and press return. That will keep in
VGA mode, which might well be faster/usable.
Huge thanks for the reply, Andy!
Yes, it made a difference. Drawing each cell only takes 0.25
seconds. :-P
So somewhat faster, anyway. It's funny. It starts out quite
fast. The speed I normally experience with other stuff. It
writes
Available consoles:
text VGA ...
ttya port 0x3f8
ttyb ... not present
ttyc ... not present
ttyd ... not present
null software device
spin software device
Right at this point is where it drops to about 1/2 or slower speed.
Then, cell by cell, it prints
console ttyb failed to initialize
console ttyc failed to initialize
console ttyd failed to initialize
This is the point where you have got hint about why this happens. The
same defect
is with virtualbox, when you have configured host pipe for serial
device.
The three lines above tell us that ttya was successfully initialized, so
it must
have to do about ttya.
OK I neglected to note that this was including the advice by Andy to drop
to
text mode, by interrupting loader, and entering -t at the prompt followed
by
enter. It's clear that it was attempting serial mode -- note the port
0x3f8
Without interrupting loader, text and ttya return:
text VESA (800x600 - 1600x1200 depending on what I'm hooked up to)
ttya ... not present
I'm attempting it again via Legacy where
text VESA 1600x1200
ttya ... not present
Choosing 5 (options), followed by 5 (verbose) has already taken 20
minutes (it's still in progress). I think I'm just going to try to
install it and work on it further from the internal disk. In hopes
of getting at least a small speed increase from 0 to actual boot.
I greatly appreciate your insight on this, Toomas.
Ok, so this guess was not good one afterall. If you are doing CD (ISO)
boot, you
will get loader started as first stage - that is, there is no way to enter
options; however, once you get out of menu and on O prompt, you can enter:
framebuffer off
on BIOS boot, this will switch to VGA text mode, on UEFI, it will switch
terminal
draw from GOP Blt() to SimpleTextOutput protocol (gfx can not be switched
off as
there is no VGA text mode in UEFI, there may not be even VGA).
If you are booting from USB stick, press space on very first spinner to
get boot:
prompt, from there you can enter: -t as Andy was suggesting, it will start
loader
in text mode, without switching to VBE framebuffer. Once the OS is
installed, you
can create /boot/config with -t in it, this will achieve the same effect.
That much about workaround.
“normally”, if drawing in FB mode is slow, it will help to use lower
resolution
and/or depth, but as you wrote, 800x600 was just as bad as 1920x1200, it
means
something else is going on there.
You can set mode as: framebuffer set XxY[xD], where D is for depth,
defaults to
32, if not present. framebuffer list [depth] will list available modes.
With BIOS
mode, you can also try something like 640x400 or 640x480, below that the
terminal
will get too weird even with 6x12 font...
If depth 8 or 15/16 does not make it faster, it still means there is
something
weird going on, and at this point, I’d suggest to check if there is
firmware
update from vendor. (tbh, firmware update would be good as first check,
the hw
vendors are known to produce a lot of bad things, especially if it comes
to have
bios emulation with uefi csm.).
Sure. Good point. But already updated it. You've given me some things to
poke at.
I'll give them a try, and see if anything interesting develops.
Thank you very much for taking the time, Toomas. Greatly appreciated!
Well, I wrote that stuff;)
You seemed like a nice person. It's a pity I have to hate you now for
doing that. ;-)
Seriously tho. After some 5 days now poking at this, and only getting
marginal
improvements via different framebuffer settings (BTW how does one make a
framebuffer setting stick from boot to boot?).
It occurred to me that I didn't recall having any of these problems on
earlier
SunOS/Solaris, or Illumos/OI installs. So I decided to walk back in history,
and see if I could discover where the problem left/started. So, always
choosing
text install images, I went from OI-hipster-text-20201031.usb, to
OI-hipster-text-20200504.usb, to OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb, and BINGO!
Everything worked perfectly. The time to the boot options menu/banner was
*instantaneous*. So I figured I'd simply walk the commits going forward to
discover what introduced the slow screen writes.
On OI-hipster-text-20201031.usb:
% time ls --color=force -Cla /usr/include/
took 22.4s
On OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb:
% time ls --color=force -Cla /usr/include/
0.000u 8.270s 0:08.28 99.8%
That's 3 times faster!
Finding that many of the tools I need weren't available because I needed
to bootstrap a newer version of pkg. I did the unthinkable, and issued
pkg update -v
Which of course required a reboot into the new environment. The results
of the new environment was unrewarding. Getting to the boot options
menu/banner screen took nearly 9 minutes. Now I'm back to square 0. :-(
Altho illumos-3c2328bf3b:
% time ls --color=force -Cla /usr/include/
0.008u 8.999s 0:09.11 98.6%
Which is *technically* slower. The difference is negligible for sure.
But the fonts don't seem as smooth. In all cases the EDID was read
correctly (1920x1200 @32bpp). OH and if it matters, it's on an Intel
chipset (Intel video).
Time to (re)install OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb and start over.
Any thoughts? Best places to look? I'd love to shorten the timeline
to a (correctly) working install of OI. 7 days and counting.
rgds,
toomas
--Chris
--
~10yrs a FreeBSD maintainer of ~160 ports
~40yrs of UNIX
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