Re: How to enable DMA at boot time

[Shyamal Prasad <shyamal.prasad@sbcglobal.net>]

    "Clive" == Clive Standbridge <sink@ghaary.connectfree.co.uk> writes:

    Clive> On Thu 28 Nov 2002 22:45:39 +0000(-0600), Shyamal Prasad
    Clive> wrote:
    >>  Hmmmm...that is a truly interesting measure. Since I rarely
    >> boot my machine I've never looked at DMA as a way of speeding
    >> up the boot sequence. Cool. I feel like I've learned a whole
    >> new view of things :-)

    Clive> I'm not sure whether a sarcastic overtone was intended, but
    Clive> I like it anyway. :-)

No sarcasm intended at all! I thought it was a really cool idea for
machines I do boot frequently (laptops).

    >> I'm curious now: how many seconds to when your root FS is
    >> mounted?  That would determine the upper bound on the
    >> improvement.

    Clive> 5 seconds.  hwtools runs after 46 seconds.

    >> Is most of the time spent building module dependencies?

    Clive> How would I measure that?

If you are using one of the pre-packaged 2.4.x kernels from Debian
then it will be modular. During boot you will see a "Calculating
module dependencies...." message followed by much disk whirring. For
me, this is the single slowest step during a boot. I just measure it
with a stop watch (actually, I count seconds ;-)

Cheers!
Shyamal