59 replies to this topic

[Bri]

Some weeks ago I bought a clarke tech ET9100. The boot process from deep stand by needs a lot of time. (about one minute) My old TechniSat Digicorder S2 needed only 5s. Therefore my plan is to speed up the boot process. I think the best solution would be a "suspend-to-disk". Has anyone tried this? I read in an other forum that it will only work on x86 systems not on MIPS based systems.
A more simple solution might be to install the OpenPLi software on the internal hard disk. Flash is quite slow, the hard disk should be much faster. I guess the clarke tech bootloader can start linux from internal flash only. So a second boot loader would be necessary. The clarke tech boot loader starts the second boot loader from flash and the second boot loader starts OpenPLi from hard disk. Or maybe the clarke tech bootloader loads only the kernel and some necessary files from flash and all other is read from hard disk later.
What do you think about this? Will it speed up the boot process?

[Erik Slagter]

Suspend to ram or disk is something the mips arch probably can do, but lacks support for in the kernel, and in that case you won't get far (i.e. not at all).

My dm8000 takes three minutes to boot, I think your stb is probably already much faster.

How about simply keeping it in "standby" instead of powering it off?

[Bri]

The ET9100 has a power consumption of about 20W in standby mode. Nearly no difference to normal power on mode. Therefore I would like to use the deep standby mode as much as possible.

First I will try to compile a small version of OpenPLi without the software packages I do not need. (samba, vnc, ...) I think this will speed up the boot process a little bit.
Then I will try to find a way to install OpenPLi on the hard disk.

[MiLo]

First I will try to compile a small version of OpenPLi without the software packages I do not need. (samba, vnc, ...) I think this will speed up the boot process a little bit.

A double "no" is the answer.
No, it will not speed up the boot (or at least - not that you'll notice, it might shave off half a second if you remove everything that starts at boot).
No, you don't need to create your own image. Just remove packages you don't want with "opkg remove ...".

Then I will try to find a way to install OpenPLi on the hard disk.

That will only increase the boot time.

I suggest that you attach a serial cable and take a look at the boot messages to see what's going on.

[Erik Slagter]

What is the actual time you need to perform a full boot?

[Dimitrij]

This is just ridiculous.
One minute, is it long?
Where were you before, when the loading takes 2-3 minutes ...

[littlesat]

This is an disadvantage of a Linux box... For a linux box 1 minute is extreme short!!!

[MiLo]

Actually, it's more like 20 seconds for Linux and 40 seconds for Enigma2.

[WanWizard]

And don't forget Enigma2 needs quite a bit of time loading large epg files, and all the defined bouquets... Without them it starts a lot quicker.

[Bri]

The ET9100 needs 67s until I see a picture. Try to explain this your wife if you spent 350€ for a new cool receiver and your old receiver needed only 5s. ;-)

I thought the boot process will need less time if the image is smaller because I thought the whole image ist copied to RAM first and the most time is needed to copy the data. But then I read about JFFS2/UBIFS. (This is the first time I work with embedded linux. Before I used FreeRTOS for my embedded projects.) During my last project I wrote a driver for a NAND flash in combination with a FAT32 file system. For large data transfers the NAND flash was quite fast, but for random access with small pieces of data it was very very slow because a whole page must be read always. I know JFFS2/UBIFS uses caching. However I guess the boot process will be much faster if the root fs is ext2 and copied to RAM before linux starts. An extra partition could be used to store enigma2 settings in the NAND flash. I will try it after christmas. I think I will need some days to understand the boot process to do the necessary modifications.

[littlesat]

This is the disadvantage from a linux box... if it was a WIndows Box then it even takes longer.... .

If you do not want this then go back to a "normal" box -or- use the normal standby option.

Please note in fact you are booting a "small-PC"....

I do not think that a hibernate option will go faster...

Edited by littlesat, 22 December 2011 - 22:32.

[Hump]

My et9x00 needs exactly 56 seconds from deep standby until it shows a live picture. This is extremly fast, compared to other Linux boxes. If you manage to speed it up to 20sec, let me know!

[littlesat]

In the past since UBIFS it was already speeded up with approx 30 % / 2 minutes....

[MiLo]

The ET9100 needs 67s until I see a picture. Try to explain this your wife if you spent 350€ for a new cool receiver and your old receiver needed only 5s. ;-)

Be glad you didn't buy the dm8000, then you'd have spent 900€ to boot in over 2 minutes.

[MiLo]

My dm7025 has a ext3 rootfs on a CF card, and boots in just over a minute. The 7025 is way slower than the other boxes (single-core 250MHz, the HD boxes all have 400MHz dual-threading cores). If you want to boot from a RAM, it would make more sense to use cramfs or so as filesystem. I don't think you'll see any improvement at all on the et9x00, because ubifs is actually already doing what you propose - copying everything to RAM.

[daddelfalk]

Hi,

yes, i don't have any noticable and further optimizations for the etxxxx STBs, so i must totally agress with Milo's statement and Soc has not Dual-Threaded, but Dual-Core

[Bri]

After reading some tutorials I decided to install the root fs on internal hard disk to speed up the boot process. It needs only minor changes in the kernel configuration. (kernel command line parameters: bmem=216M root=/dev/sda1 rootfstype=ext2 rw console=ttyS0,115200n8 fbcon=font:8x16) The kernel is still loaded from flash but all other data is read from the hard disk. I hope my new hard disk will arrive soon. I have already build the image but I can not test it at the moment.

[Erik Slagter]

I've run my dm7000's from NFS for years, but flash was still quicker (although also very slow...)

[pieterg]

After reading some tutorials I decided to install the root fs on internal hard disk to speed up the boot process. It needs only minor changes in the kernel configuration. (kernel command line parameters: bmem=216M root=/dev/sda1 rootfstype=ext2 rw console=ttyS0,115200n8 fbcon=font:8x16) The kernel is still loaded from flash but all other data is read from the hard disk. I hope my new hard disk will arrive soon. I have already build the image but I can not test it at the moment.

that is going to save you ~2s ubi attach time

The real timeconsuming part of booting is when e2 starts.

[MiLo]

I guess Bri just won't believe us until he finds out for himself. Ah well, he'll learn two things then...