[debian] Re: How stupid I was to choose vfat for /boot

Andy Green andy at openmoko.com
Thu Nov 20 21:42:48 CET 2008


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Somebody in the thread at some point said:

| [Quoting more than needed so the smartphones-userland dudes see this
| as Andy in not subscribed so his reply never got there.]

| Let's think of ways the user can influence Qi's behavior while not
| complicating Qi. (And not needing to remember to hold buttons.)
| Perhaps if qi notices a file exists in the same boot directory,
| qi_debug, it could turn on debugging. I assume qi cannot read files,
| just detect their presence.
|
| Also maybe different variations of the file name to make qi do
| different things... of course then one wants to work in the factor of
| upward compatibility... So perhaps QI_FFFF where FFFF are a hex bit
| mask of debugging or other levels. And maybe this needs a -GTA02
| appended too.

Yes this has been requested... Qi can read the files fine, the concept
is a "commandline append" option file which as you say is per-device
like the kernel.

| Anyway, I timed a Qi boot and a vfat+ext2 NOR boot, and they took
| exactly the same time. 56 seconds to X windows appears, and at 69
| seconds all is finished and we can type on the xvkbd. (Note I don't
| have anything that uses its four antennas installed.) The only
| difference is there is no messages with qi (bad).

But what did you time exactly?

Time the wallclock time from poweron -> X or whatever in both NAND Qi
and NAND U-Boot cases, I think you find Qi is significantly faster.
post-Kernel boot action itself and everything south of that will be the
same... but that time from powerup to kernel boot is significantly
improved by Qi.

No messages with Qi is only bad if you need to debug -- normal users do
not normally want to see syslog.

- -Andy
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