speeding up bios POST

[Matt Price]

On Sun, 2009-03-29 at 22:10 -0400, ted leslie wrote:
> that does sound unusually long,
> if you want really fast boot,
> i just bought a intel flash 32GB solid state drive,
> with the insanely small "seek time",
> it max's out the sata3 bus for reads, and almost for writes,
> it speed up the kernel boot up by say only 2X
> but the gnome desktop bootup!! it went from
> (with a normal hard drive) to seeing the different
> modules of gnome (icons) come up, then go to desktop,
> to , do fast you cant see the different modules, to
> basically 1 second to the desk top.
> Generally it speed up everything by a solid 2-3 times,
> but anything that is many file opening at once,
> say a big app going after much .so's/dll
> wow!  you can easily see 20X speed up.
> a bit pricy at 400$ for 32GB, but it will come down soon enough.
> I am going to raid-0 (or 50-60) 6-8 or so of these together to max out a
> 3ware pciE card, get hopefully about 1.5GB/second transfer,
> be nice to tranfer a DVD worth of data in 3 seconds!!
> The way flash drives are going (i.e. platter HD's are basically dead now),
> this will probably be normal speeds (for disk access) for people in 3-4 years. 
> 

wow.  that sounds pretty cool.  but i think i'm going to have to wait a
year or two for prices to come down -- $400 is wayyyyy out of my price
range.  nice to know it makes such a difference, though...

m




> -tl
> 
> On Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:57:03 -0400
> Matt Price <matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> > hi folks,
> > 
> > i'm building a brand-new system, which i have to say is blazing fast --
> > it's built around an asus p5n7a-vm MB, with a mid-level core2duo chip.
> > I've installed ubuntu jaunty, which boots pretty quickly from grub --
> > less than 20 seconds to gnome session -- but, to me astonishingly, it
> > takes 15 seconds from power-on to GRUB.  this just seems crazy long, and
> > I wonder what I can do to change it.  The BIOS is a pretty standard
> > American Megatrends AMIBIOS, on which I've enabled 'quickboot' (that did
> > seem to help a little) and disabled the express gate, which wasn't
> > working anyway (i'm actually not even sure if the flash module is
> > installed on the board, don't really knowmuch about express-gate).  but
> > there are still long pauses I can't explain.  so i'm wondering:  is
> > there a way to 'bootchart' your bios?  or are there standard methods for
> > speeding it up?  
> > 
> > thanks as always,
> > 
> > matt
> > 
> > 
> > ps, if someone can explain the expressgatething to me, i'd be grateful
> > for that as well.  i'm wondering if i could just install my main OS on a
> > CF card and boot directly into that without having to go through
> > BIOS...  
> > 
> > -- 
> > Matt Price
> > matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
> > --
> > The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
> > TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
> > How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists
> > 
> 
> 
-- 
Matt Price
matt.price-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists