Re: How to enable DMA at boot time

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

    "jah" == jah pigeon <Pigeon> writes:

    jah> On Sun, Dec 01, 2002 at 07:23:03PM -0600, Shyamal Prasad
    jah> wrote:
    >> 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 ;-)

    jah> Is this a feature of the prepackaged kernel setup then? I'm
    jah> running 2.4.18 compiled straight from the original
    jah> www.kernel.org source with no "Debianisation". I have what I
    jah> consider to be a lot of modules:

Yes, sort of.

shyamal@rattler:~$ find /lib/modules/2.4.18-k7/kernel/ -name '*.o' -print | wc -l
    842

So there is a lot for depmod to do on starting up. I suspect you have
way fewer than 842 modules.

Personally, I rarely boot my machines (I had to last night,
Thanksgiving visitors had to sleep in the computer room: my machine is
named rattler for the CPU fan ;-) so this rarely matters to me.


    jah> but the "Calculating module dependencies" step flashes by so
    jah> fast I can't see it. In fact the only bit I can read is the
    jah> spinning up of my SCSI disks. Do I guess correctly that the
    jah> difference is because the prepackaged kernel has zillions of
    jah> modules and takes ages to work out which ones it doesn't
    jah> need, whereas mine has few more than the above list? So you
    jah> might be able to speed things up by hiding the modules you
    jah> don't need?

Yes, one could simply remove the modules one does not need and depmod
should go faster. Or one could build a custom kernel. But the nice
thing about Debian's 2.4 kernels is I've never had to recompile a
kernel except to support broken hardware :-)

Cheers!
Shyamal