[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] I'd like to help improve boot times...

[From: Ryan Pavlik]

I think it's worthwhile work to look into, because it does take a while 
to boot up.  True, I don't boot mine often either, but mostly because 
I've heard (and experience bears out) that on the devices 1 boot = ~3-5 
days of standby/sleep.  My thinking is perhaps if boot is faster, a) 
less power is needed and b) sophisticated PM can be brought up perhaps 
sooner (this is completely out of my realm though), besides the obvious 
effect of faster boot.

(Probably the fact the device seems to have 3 separate splash screens 
then boots to a not-yet-functional desktop exacerbates the feeling of a 
slow boot.)

Good luck!  I might suggest trying the VMWare Maemo SDK - for me it was 
way easier to get working than a direct install of the Scratchbox 
environment, but of course YMMV.

Ryan

Magnus Deininger wrote:
> Well, true that but it sure can be an annoyance if your battery runs  
> out and the first thing you notice is that the device is having you  
> wait a couple of minutes. And the way I see it, if your device boots  
> fast enough, you could just as well shut it down completely instead of  
> putting it into stand-by mode, thus essentially giving you unlimited  
> stand-by time.
>
> On the bright side, if if bootup times aren't too much of a concern  
> for most users, einit also provides for a centralised hardware event  
> handler and allows the actions to this to have very little overhead by  
> being able to write handlers in C or anything else that compiles to an  
> ELF object file. It also has service supervision and provides for  
> backup plans if something won't start, which tend to come in handy a  
> lot on embedded devices.
>
> -- Magnus
>
> Quoting Frank Banul <frank.banul at gmail.com>:
>
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> No offence but I would guess most people don't boot their devices   
>> very often. It would be nice to have faster boot times but I rarely   
>> boot my device. Just an opinion. I hope it's helpful.
>>
>> Frank
>>
>> ----- Original message -----
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I'm Magnus Deininger, aka jyujin, head of the eINIT project, a~nd I'd 
>> like help the maemo project by improving bootup times. One of my 
>> friends is telling me that maemo devices are booting 'unbearably slow' 
>> and that this would be quite the complaint with customers; he's going 
>> so far as to offer his Nokia 770 for the cause if i can make it boot 
>> faster.
>>
>> My pet project (eINIT, http://einit.org) is currently doing reasonably 
>> well at making computers boot faster, but we haven't tried to make it 
>> work on too many embedded devices just yet, mostly because we're a bit 
>> tight on devs and time... and people that would be interested in 
>> seeing it on their embedded device. We're still doing quite the 
>> progress in boot times tho, as could be seen by this little video 
>> (taken by that friend of mine who'd like to see his nokia 770 boot 
>> faster): 
>> http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-2744120711983143659 . 
>> That's booting fairly fast, especially considering it boots right into 
>> compiz... I also made this bootchart: http://omploader.org/vZHdj -- 
>> which is on my main desktop, without any real optimisations. Both 
>> boxes (the one in the video, and mine) used to boot in about 1 to 1:20 
>> minutes before, so that's /quite/ an improvement right there.
>>
>> Now seeing as my friend has some issues with his device, I'd like to 
>> help him, and the maemo project, but since I'm a bit tight on time, 
>> I'd first like to know if anyone else is actually interested in me 
>> porting eINIT to maemo, since I'd hate setting up a devel environment 
>> for a single device ;). Which brings me to why I'm posting on this ML 
>> in the first place: I'd like to know if people /are/ interested in 
>> this or not. Just get right back at me if there's any interest. I'll 
>> monitor this ML for the time being, and I'd also like to invite any 
>> interested developers to join our IRC channel, #einit on freenode.
>>
>> So, that concludes my offer I think.
>>
>> Greets, and happy hacking,
>> Magnus Deininger
>> http://einit.org/
>> IRC: jyujin on freenode; #einit
>>
>> PS.: Oh, not to forget, eINIT is BSD-licenced, so there shouldn't be 
>> any weird licencing issues from a business POV either, if that would 
>> ever be an issue.
>>
>>     


-- 
Ryan Pavlik
www.cleardefinition.com

#282  +  (442) -  [X]
A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;