speeding up bios POST

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 07:57:03PM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> 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?  

I don't know of any way.  I have an old 486 that goes from power on to
grub in about 5 seconds.  I wish all bioses were like that.  I wish bios
makers would work a little harder on speeding things up.  Do they ever
consider how much of the planet's time they are wasting?

> 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...  

If you want that, then you probably want a board capable of running
linuxbios.  Most can't.

Expressgate is different.  I believe it only initializes the hardware
that the expressgate system will use, saving some startup time.  I haven't
really looked into it though, so I am only speculating.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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