Hi all,

I took the Crux PPC 2.2.0.2 ISO, copied all the files to a USB hard drive, and was able to install Curx on my Efika. Was painless once I realised I needed to add the rootdelay=10 option to the kernel arguments!

I elected to use the pre-compiled zImage-Efika kernel on the CD to save myself the time of compiling a new kernel. So I copied the kernel file and the System.map-Efika to the hard disk.

Now my system is booting okay, but it is extremely slow to load the kernel. Here's what I'm seeing right now:

kernel load (#'s on the screen) = 2 minutes 27 sec
kernel boot (text after #'s) = 4 sec
init scripts (including net) = 23 sec

I initially thought my slow boot times were due to the USB interface, and was hoping things would impouve once I got everything installed on the HD. They did improve a bit, but seems to be an awfully long time to load a 2.2Mb kernel! :(

Is there anything that I need to do to improve this? Should I just bite the bullet and compile a new kernel?

Seems to me that I saw someone mention a kernel load time of roughly 5-6 seconds with a 6Mb kernel... So I must be doing something wrong! :wink:

I am hoping to get a cross development environment set-up so I can cross compile from my XP laptop, but that's a whole other story...

Any insight would be helpful!!! Thanks!

Sandy

Hello,
I recently released a ready to use flash drive image (just format your pendrive ext2/3 and untar the archive on it...)
You're right the boot from usb is not the fastest thing you can expect, but as far as the image is stripped (i had some problems but i will start working on it again very soon and it will be much more stripped) i experience pretty quick boot times... and an hard disk install with the same kernel only takes only few seconds to boot... i will measure them and let you know in the next post... anyway you can read about the flash image here:
http://cruxppc.sunsite.dk/wp/news/36
the readme is located here:
http://cruxppc.sunsite.dk/downloads/cruxppc2.2-efika-mini-1.README

The image is ready to use, you can even copy it on hd and then install more packages or compile ports the usual crux way, only consider that you might have to force the installation of gcc because to make it the quick and dirty way i took some needed files from the gcc package... or you could just steal the kernel and modules from there...

bye, and thanks for your feedback! ;-)

Well here some data:

my efika boots from hd with 3 sec delays at auto-boot in 34s, activating services net, sshd and cron. 512Mb swap is initialized too and root partition is 8Gb reiserfs mounted with noatime and /usr/src aka usr ports is 8gb reiserfs mounted with noatime; the hard disk is a quick enough toshiba mk8025ga.
This means that from the start of kernel loading to the login prompt it takes about 18 seconds... (efika takes 13 secs to init + 3 secs boot delay) it's not too bad imho.

Booting from usb is obviously much slower... it takes 1minute 24seconds plus the usual 13 seconds efika takes to initialize plus 3 secs of wait in case you want to abort the boot with default nv values. In this case there are 8 seconsd of rootdelay, only net and cron are starting (but net is not configured), root partition is 1Gb ext3 partition on 1Gb flash drive mounted with noatime. This is a plain CRUX PPC 2.2 Efika mini1 thrown on a pendrive.

hope this can be useful to solve your problems, if you need it i will send u the kernel config, anyway we will tune the config on a more recent kernel with newer patches soon.

Giorgio

Solved my problem...

I had been messing with some open firmware settings a while back and I must have set something up wrong. I reset the nvram settings to defaults and that solved my problem.

Efika now boots from the HD in 30 seconds or so, looks like I'm off and running.

Sandy

PS : Did already download your stripped image, have not used it yet thought...