[Gta04-owner] GTA04 Boot speed comparison

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Am 21.09.2011 um 14:54 schrieb Davide Scaini:

> But the comparison is a bit unfair... try to boot shr from nand i'm sure i will be faster than iphone.


We just did not have a GTA02 with a working installation in NAND, except that old SD card
we use for device testing after buzz-fixes.

For us, the GTA02 devices have mostly become sources for plastic parts and are not used
for developing or installing new software :)

So I respect that the newer versions e.g. of SHR and QtMoko are booting much faster.

Nevertheless, the GTA04 isn't optimized at all. Firstly, it waits 1 second on the RS232
for breaking into U-Boot. Then, it loads the 3 MByte kernel with most modules compiled in,
and prints the full boot log to the RS232 interface (limited to 115 kbit/s = ca. 10k characters
per second). Finally, the rootfs is a plain standard Debian Squeeze without any optimization
for boot speed.

For me, the most surprising result is that it already boots without any optimizations
significantly faster into GUI mode than the iPhone.

BTW: David has reported that the original QtMoko rootfs image does boot and allows to
do some useful things on the GTA04. So it does not appear difficult to adapt a real and full
QtMoko (or SHR or hackable:1 or ...) release for the GTA04.