Cyrus+

Very interesting thread

Keep the info coming :P...

@LyleHaze
You said, "The CF slot on Nemo IS used for boot. it holds amigaboot.of, which can also be loaded from the first partition of the HD."

I'm puzzled. The manual for the X1000 says under "Motherboard Features," "One CF (Compact Flash) slot." Until I installed Linux, my CF slot was empty, and now it has a card with a couple of Linux kernels in it, but certainly no amigaboot.of.

On the other hand, I imagine it might be possible to copy amigaboot.of to it and change the first CFE command to address it. Is that what you have done and assume everyone else has too? (If amigaboot.of isn't too hard for me to find, I might even give that a try. And, with my luck, discover that that is a good way to turn the X1000 into a huge paperweight.)

Hi kilaueabart,

I've seen a thread somewhere about people talking about boot up times on their AmigaOne X1000's and I think that some were able to get very fast boots, while others weren't able to get anywhere near their numbers.... Is it possible that the ones who couldn't, didn't have the compact flash card installed, or were simply not aware of it being there to use, and obviously, therefore, didn't???


Important information, that is!!!!

@kilaueabart

amigaboot.of is the first step in loading up AmigaOS. CFE must be able to load amigaboot.of from somewhere it can read. The common way is to have the first partition on your hard drive as a very small FFS partition, and to load amigaboot.of from there. (CFE can read FFS!) In truth it can be on ANY device that CFE can read from, including the compact flash card.

@Atheist

I am one of the few that never tried to accellerate my X1000 startup, but there are a few tricks that can help. I don't think putting amigaboot.of on a compact flash would make much of a difference, as the file is barely 50K in size.

Depending on how your system is set up, there may be one or two separate menus to select your boot device from. the fewer the menus, and the faster the menus time out, the quicker your boot time will be.

Another method is to adjust the CPU clock as part of your startup.. without adjustment it will start at a very conservative(slow) rate, and will speed up later after the OS loads up. There is a CFE command to get the speedup sooner if desired.

Running the network-startup script asynchronously is a big speedup, as long as anything that requires a network connection comes later in that same script. Past those things, all the tricks that are common to all versions of AmigaOS also apply here. And there may be more that I have forgotten.

If you have an X1000 you'll find lots of details in Sys:Documentation/X1000_CFE.pdf. The menu systems and even the clock speedup are described clearly in that document.

@Atheist
I realized right after posting the "amigaboot.of on the CF card" idea that, as LyleHaze points out, it probably wouldn't speed things up much, because that is where I do have my linux kernel, and linux comes up even slower than OS4!

@faster bootup

We must aim at about 3s boot times.

To me it seems:
-we need bios tuned to enable faster launch of kickstart
(or a "Amiga" boot bios, without that stone-age textual interface that maisntream uses even today ... damn, kickstart2 already looked better...)
-kickstart should be loaded before HDD spins up
-after kickstart is loaded, system can check if some new HW has appeared that needs something special, etc.
-user should have option for safer slow boot if error occurs

Also ... on multicore systems there could be system that enables parallel operations of kickstart loading and bios digging up the HW.

@KimmoK

Keep in mind that CFE is more like a small OS than a hard coded BIOS.

All that time before the menu comes up is that little OS doing its' thing and
putting the results where the next OS to load can read it.

Kind of........if you know what I mean?????