Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 7. Feb 2021, at 20:20, Chris  wrote:
> 
> On 2021-02-07 01:48, Toomas Soome wrote:
>>> On 7. Feb 2021, at 09:04, Chris  wrote:
>>> On 2021-02-06 13:36, Chris wrote:
 On 2021-02-06 00:56, Toomas Soome wrote:
>> On 6. Feb 2021, at 01:41, Chris  wrote:
>> On 2021-02-05 14:16, Chris wrote:
>>> On 2021-02-05 13:46, Toomas Soome wrote:
> On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris  wrote:
> On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:
>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
>>> On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:
> On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
> On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:
>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-02-07 01:48, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 7. Feb 2021, at 09:04, Chris  wrote:

On 2021-02-06 13:36, Chris wrote:

On 2021-02-06 00:56, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 6. Feb 2021, at 01:41, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-02-05 14:16, Chris wrote:

On 2021-02-05 13:46, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 7. Feb 2021, at 09:04, Chris  wrote:
> 
> On 2021-02-06 13:36, Chris wrote:
>> On 2021-02-06 00:56, Toomas Soome wrote:
 On 6. Feb 2021, at 01:41, Chris  wrote:
 On 2021-02-05 14:16, Chris wrote:
> On 2021-02-05 13:46, Toomas Soome wrote:
>>> On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris  wrote:
>>> On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:
> On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
> On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:
>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
>>> On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:
> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-02-06 13:36, Chris wrote:

On 2021-02-06 00:56, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 6. Feb 2021, at 01:41, Chris  wrote:

On 2021-02-05 14:16, Chris wrote:

On 2021-02-05 13:46, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-02-06 00:56, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 6. Feb 2021, at 01:41, Chris  wrote:

On 2021-02-05 14:16, Chris wrote:

On 2021-02-05 13:46, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 6. Feb 2021, at 01:44, Joshua M. Clulow via openindiana-discuss 
>  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 5 Feb 2021 at 15:40, Chris  wrote:
>>> Thanks for taking the time to reply, Toomas! :-)
>> OK we have a winner! Thanks to some advice from Toomas:
>> adding: console=text to /boot/conf.d/console
>> which I later moved to /boot/loader.conf.local (console="text")
>> followed by commenting the console= line from /boot/default/loader.conf
>> I now have speed to boot menu that is close to the
>> OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb install I mentioned earlier in this thread.
>> While the screen still isn't as fast as the other some half dozen OSs
>> I use. It's not so slow I can't work with it. :-)
>> So a HUGE thanks go out to everyone here on the list, that chimed in
>> to help out -- THANK YOU! :-)
> 
> Does that mean loader is, on at least this machine, struggling with
> writes to a serial port which isn't there, perhaps?  (More concretely:
> why does that help?)
> 

It is the same defect we can observe with virtualbox; the machine (vm or 
physical) has serial port configured (ttya in this case), but not connected and 
polling this port is causing delays. With vbox you will get the same effect by 
setting pipe for serial port and enable that port for vm, but do not connect to 
another end..

This happens because of (mis)configured port or bios issues - if you do not use 
serial ports, it makes sense to disable them from machine setup (bios or VM), 
but also we still need some updates in this area.

We are testing the presence of serial port by writing byte to scratch register 
and reading it (see comc_setup in libi386/comconsole.c.

rgds,
toomas
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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 6. Feb 2021, at 01:41, Chris  wrote:
> 
> On 2021-02-05 14:16, Chris wrote:
>> On 2021-02-05 13:46, Toomas Soome wrote:
 On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris  wrote:
 On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:
>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
>> On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:
 On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
 On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:
>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-02-05 15:44, Joshua M. Clulow via openindiana-discuss wrote:

On Fri, 5 Feb 2021 at 15:40, Chris  wrote:

> Thanks for taking the time to reply, Toomas! :-)
OK we have a winner! Thanks to some advice from Toomas:
adding: console=text to /boot/conf.d/console
which I later moved to /boot/loader.conf.local (console="text")
followed by commenting the console= line from /boot/default/loader.conf
I now have speed to boot menu that is close to the
OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb install I mentioned earlier in this thread.
While the screen still isn't as fast as the other some half dozen OSs
I use. It's not so slow I can't work with it. :-)
So a HUGE thanks go out to everyone here on the list, that chimed in
to help out -- THANK YOU! :-)


Does that mean loader is, on at least this machine, struggling with
writes to a serial port which isn't there, perhaps?  (More concretely:
why does that help?)

Yes. It's polling for all possible cons. It does so for the sake of
remote ACCESS/INSTALLS as well as local (video). There's also a
"headless" option.


Cheers.

--Chris

--
~10yrs a FreeBSD maintainer of ~160 ports
~40yrs of UNIX

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Joshua M. Clulow via openindiana-discuss]

On Fri, 5 Feb 2021 at 15:40, Chris  wrote:
> > Thanks for taking the time to reply, Toomas! :-)
> OK we have a winner! Thanks to some advice from Toomas:
> adding: console=text to /boot/conf.d/console
> which I later moved to /boot/loader.conf.local (console="text")
> followed by commenting the console= line from /boot/default/loader.conf
> I now have speed to boot menu that is close to the
> OI-hipster-text-20191106.usb install I mentioned earlier in this thread.
> While the screen still isn't as fast as the other some half dozen OSs
> I use. It's not so slow I can't work with it. :-)
> So a HUGE thanks go out to everyone here on the list, that chimed in
> to help out -- THANK YOU! :-)

Does that mean loader is, on at least this machine, struggling with
writes to a serial port which isn't there, perhaps?  (More concretely:
why does that help?)

Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-02-05 14:16, Chris wrote:

On 2021-02-05 13:46, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris  wrote:

On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-02-05 13:46, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris  wrote:

On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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. ;-)

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 5. Feb 2021, at 19:54, Chris  wrote:
> 
> On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:
>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
>>> On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:
> On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
> On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:
>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-01-30 02:28, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:

On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-02-01 05:38, Tony Brian Albers wrote:

On 01/30/21 02:02 AM, 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?

Thank you for all your time, and consideration.

--Chris



Maybe a stupid question, but are you booting from a USB-stick or a DVD?

Not a stupid question. :-)
I tried both. I also installed to SATA based platters.


I've tried on two machines recently, one is an i7/32GB RAM with a NVIDIA
K2200 card and the other an i3/8GB RAM just got the Intel card on the CPU.

Both booted to the banner/boot screen within maybe 10secs and the
options screen shows up maybe 30 secs after exiting the boot options screen.

Both machines booted from a cheap 8GB USB stick.

I used legacy boot, not UEFI.

I tried both UEFI && BIOS, 2 different Nvidia cards, and 2 different Intel
chipsets. As well as 2 AMDs with the 2 Nvidia cards. Results in all cases
were disappointing.


Both have SSD's as internal disks. One also has a SATA 3,5" 7200rpm
drive, but that doesn't seem to make a difference.

No difference for me either.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Tony. :-)


/tony

--Chris

--
~10yrs a FreeBSD maintainer of ~160 ports
~40yrs of UNIX

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Tony Brian Albers]

On 01/30/21 02:02 AM, 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?
> 
> Thank you for all your time, and consideration.
> 
> --Chris
> 

Maybe a stupid question, but are you booting from a USB-stick or a DVD?

I've tried on two machines recently, one is an i7/32GB RAM with a NVIDIA 
K2200 card and the other an i3/8GB RAM just got the Intel card on the CPU.

Both booted to the banner/boot screen within maybe 10secs and the 
options screen shows up maybe 30 secs after exiting the boot options screen.

Both machines booted from a cheap 8GB USB stick.

I used legacy boot, not UEFI.

Both have SSD's as internal disks. One also has a SATA 3,5" 7200rpm 
drive, but that doesn't seem to make a difference.

/tony

-- 
Tony Albers - Systems Architect - IT Development Royal Danish Library, 
Victor Albecks Vej 1, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
Tel: +45 2566 2383 - CVR/SE: 2898 8842 - EAN: 5798000792142

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 1/30/21 9:54 AM, John D Groenveld wrote:

Is anyone here free to explain why nVidia still provides its binaries
for OpenSolaris and how much longer its obligated to provide that
support?


Do they actually claim to support OpenSolaris or OpenIndiana?  I thought
they just provided binaries for Solaris 10 & 11 that happened to work on
systems that maintain a high enough level of binary compatibility with
Oracle's releases.

-alan-

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[John D Groenveld]

In message <20210130173642.ga17...@imap.fastmail.com>, Gary Mills writes:
>Also correct.  I believe that Aurelien is working on the DRM driver.
>I will be happier when that is ported and working.

+1.

Is anyone here free to explain why nVidia still provides its binaries
for OpenSolaris and how much longer its obligated to provide that
support?
John
groenv...@acm.org

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Judah Richardson]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 08:22 Gary Mills  wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 08:19:16AM +0200, Toomas Soome via
> openindiana-discuss wrote:
> >
> > > On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:57, Gary Mills  wrote:
> > >
> > > The loader works in UEFI mode, but OI does not.  Usually you are
> > > offered a choice at boot time.  Chose BIOS mode.
> >
> > What you mean by “OI does not”?
>
> In my experience with the OI live USB image, it would run in either
> mode.  Even the installer worked correctly.  However, when I tried to
> boot the disk where I just installed, it failed in UEFI mode.  It
> worked in BIOS mode.
>
Exact same experience here.

>
> The problem was likely with the VESA video driver, which is run as a
> last resort by Xorg.  The VESA driver makes BIOS calls that fail when
> there is no BIOS.  I'm using the Radeon HD 7450 video card that only
> works with the VESA driver.  Hence OI boot only works in BIOS mode.
> /var/log/Xorg.0.log tells the tale.
>
>
> --
> -Gary Mills--refurb--Winnipeg, Manitoba,
> Canada-
>
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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Lou Picciano]

Others here, perhaps more ensconced on ‘demand’ side rather than supply…  might 
do well to recognize/acknowledge, even - the depth of expertise/experience here.

> On Jan 30, 2021, at 12:36 PM, Gary Mills  wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 06:33:37PM +0200, Toomas Soome wrote:
>> 
>> oh, well, in that case, the issue is not about OI not working in
>> UEFI mode (because it does), but the issue is that Xorg can not use
>> vesa driver when there is no vesa bios (which is perfectly good
>> reason). Also, having to run OI in BIOS mode because you need to run
>> Xorg, is also good reason, but you can not tell that OI does not
>> work with UEFI, because that is not true:)
> 
> Well, that was my first impression.  I agree now that OI itself is
> not at fault.
> 
>> Of course the root cause is about missing DRM driver and thats the
>> reason why you need to use vesa in first place….
> 
> Also correct.  I believe that Aurélien is working on the DRM driver.
> I will be happier when that is ported and working.
> 
> 
> -- 
> -Gary Mills-  -refurb--Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-
> 
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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Gary Mills]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 06:33:37PM +0200, Toomas Soome wrote:
> 
> oh, well, in that case, the issue is not about OI not working in
> UEFI mode (because it does), but the issue is that Xorg can not use
> vesa driver when there is no vesa bios (which is perfectly good
> reason). Also, having to run OI in BIOS mode because you need to run
> Xorg, is also good reason, but you can not tell that OI does not
> work with UEFI, because that is not true:)

Well, that was my first impression.  I agree now that OI itself is
not at fault.

> Of course the root cause is about missing DRM driver and thats the
> reason why you need to use vesa in first place….

Also correct.  I believe that Aurélien is working on the DRM driver.
I will be happier when that is ported and working.


-- 
-Gary Mills--refurb--Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 30. Jan 2021, at 16:22, Gary Mills  wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 08:19:16AM +0200, Toomas Soome via 
> openindiana-discuss wrote:
>> 
>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:57, Gary Mills  wrote:
>>> 
>>> The loader works in UEFI mode, but OI does not.  Usually you are
>>> offered a choice at boot time.  Chose BIOS mode.
>> 
>> What you mean by “OI does not”?
> 
> In my experience with the OI live USB image, it would run in either
> mode.  Even the installer worked correctly.  However, when I tried to
> boot the disk where I just installed, it failed in UEFI mode.  It
> worked in BIOS mode.
> 
> The problem was likely with the VESA video driver, which is run as a
> last resort by Xorg.  The VESA driver makes BIOS calls that fail when
> there is no BIOS.  I'm using the Radeon HD 7450 video card that only
> works with the VESA driver.  Hence OI boot only works in BIOS mode.
> /var/log/Xorg.0.log tells the tale.
> 
> 
> 

oh, well, in that case, the issue is not about OI not working in UEFI mode 
(because it does), but the issue is that Xorg can not use vesa driver when 
there is no vesa bios (which is perfectly good reason). Also, having to run OI 
in BIOS mode because you need to run Xorg, is also good reason, but you can not 
tell that OI does not work with UEFI, because that is not true:)

Of course the root cause is about missing DRM driver and thats the reason why 
you need to use vesa in first place….

Just to keep records correct,
toomas
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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Gary Mills]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 08:19:16AM +0200, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss 
wrote:
> 
> > On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:57, Gary Mills  wrote:
> > 
> > The loader works in UEFI mode, but OI does not.  Usually you are
> > offered a choice at boot time.  Chose BIOS mode.
> 
> What you mean by “OI does not”?

In my experience with the OI live USB image, it would run in either
mode.  Even the installer worked correctly.  However, when I tried to
boot the disk where I just installed, it failed in UEFI mode.  It
worked in BIOS mode.

The problem was likely with the VESA video driver, which is run as a
last resort by Xorg.  The VESA driver makes BIOS calls that fail when
there is no BIOS.  I'm using the Radeon HD 7450 video card that only
works with the VESA driver.  Hence OI boot only works in BIOS mode.
/var/log/Xorg.0.log tells the tale.


-- 
-Gary Mills--refurb--Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 30. Jan 2021, at 10:39, Chris  wrote:
> 
> On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:
>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
>>> On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:
> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-01-30 00:03, Toomas Soome wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:

On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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!


rgds,
toomas


--Chris



If you comment out (I am assuming you have installed OS) the line:
console="text, ttya, ttyb, ttyc, ttyd”
from /boot/defaults/loader.conf, you will probably find the console is 
much better.

rgds,
toomas

--Chris

Then clears the screen to draw 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 30. Jan 2021, at 09:40, Chris  wrote:
> 
> On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:
>>> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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.).

rgds,
toomas

>> If you comment out (I am assuming you have installed OS) the line:
>> console="text, ttya, ttyb, ttyc, ttyd”
>> from /boot/defaults/loader.conf, you will probably find the console is much 
>> better.
>> rgds,
>> toomas
> --Chris
>>> Then clears the screen to draw the OI 

Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-01-29 22:24, Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss wrote:

On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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.


If you comment out (I am assuming you have installed OS) the line:

console="text, ttya, ttyb, ttyc, ttyd”

from /boot/defaults/loader.conf, you will probably find the console is much 
better.


rgds,
toomas


--Chris



Then clears the screen to draw the OI banner, and boot options.
Which takes even longer.

Not sure where to look from here. But I really appreciate your
chiming in, Andy.

Thanks!

--Chris


Andy




--
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~40yrs of UNIX

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:43, Chris  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  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.

If you comment out (I am assuming you have installed OS) the line:

console="text, ttya, ttyb, ttyc, ttyd”

from /boot/defaults/loader.conf, you will probably find the console is much 
better.

rgds,
toomas


> Then clears the screen to draw the OI banner, and boot options.
> Which takes even longer.
> 
> Not sure where to look from here. But I really appreciate your
> chiming in, Andy.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> --Chris
> 
>> Andy
> 
> -- 
> ~10yrs a FreeBSD maintainer of ~160 ports
> ~40yrs of UNIX
> 
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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 30. Jan 2021, at 03:57, Gary Mills  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 05:02:21PM -0800, 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
> 
> You can't do that.  You have to boot OI in BIOS mode.
> 
> The loader works in UEFI mode, but OI does not.  Usually you are
> offered a choice at boot time.  Chose BIOS mode.
> 

What you mean by “OI does not”?

rgds,
toomas
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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Toomas Soome via openindiana-discuss]

> On 30. Jan 2021, at 06:52, Chris  wrote:
> 
> On 2021-01-29 17:57, Gary Mills wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 05:02:21PM -0800, 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
>> You can't do that.  You have to boot OI in BIOS mode.
>> The loader works in UEFI mode, but OI does not.  Usually you are
>> offered a choice at boot time.  Chose BIOS mode.
> Alright. I went to the BIOS and changed it to Legacy boot.
> Bounced the box. But the problem remains. The only perceivable
> difference. Is that when it booted to the OI UEFI firmware,
> it changed to the correct resolution: 1920x1200. But after it
> left the firmware, it went to 800x600. With legacy boot, it was
> 800x600, and then the same path as before. :-(
> 
> Thank you again, Gary for taking the time to help/respond.
> 

we fall back to 800x600 when we get no EDID information, to change, create:

/boot/loader.rc.local with line: framebuffer set 1920x1200

rgds,
toomas


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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-01-29 17:57, Gary Mills wrote:

On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 05:02:21PM -0800, 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


You can't do that.  You have to boot OI in BIOS mode.

The loader works in UEFI mode, but OI does not.  Usually you are
offered a choice at boot time.  Chose BIOS mode.

Alright. I went to the BIOS and changed it to Legacy boot.
Bounced the box. But the problem remains. The only perceivable
difference. Is that when it booted to the OI UEFI firmware,
it changed to the correct resolution: 1920x1200. But after it
left the firmware, it went to 800x600. With legacy boot, it was
800x600, and then the same path as before. :-(

Thank you again, Gary for taking the time to help/respond.

--Chris

--
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~40yrs of UNIX

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

On 2021-01-29 17:57, Gary Mills wrote:

On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 05:02:21PM -0800, 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


You can't do that.  You have to boot OI in BIOS mode.

The loader works in UEFI mode, but OI does not.  Usually you are
offered a choice at boot time.  Chose BIOS mode.

Thanks, Gary. I'll give that a shot.

--Chris

--
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~40yrs of UNIX

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Gary Mills]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 05:02:21PM -0800, 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

You can't do that.  You have to boot OI in BIOS mode.

The loader works in UEFI mode, but OI does not.  Usually you are
offered a choice at boot time.  Chose BIOS mode.


-- 
-Gary Mills--refurb--Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Chris]

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  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

Then clears the screen to draw the OI banner, and boot options.
Which takes even longer.

Not sure where to look from here. But I really appreciate your
chiming in, Andy.

Thanks!

--Chris



Andy




--
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~40yrs of UNIX

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Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] ~6 minutes to OI banner/boot options in text install

[Andy Fiddaman]

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  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.

Andy


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