simple task to speed up booting

[Mehmet Erol Sanliturk]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 2:32 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk>
wrote:
>
> The rotating swirlie ('-/|\') in the loader accounts for a surprisingly
> large part of our boot time on systems with slow-ish serial consoles.
>
> I think right now it takes a step for each 512 byte read, reducing that
> to once every 64kB or even 1MB would be an improvement with the kind of
> kernel sizes we have today.
>
> --
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
> _______________________________________________
>
>

My wish would be to see listing explicit steps because when a lock occurs
it would be possible to report last completed ( or started ) step .
Otherwise , actually seeing a swirling set of characters is itself not much
useful other than showing there is a progress without understanding what is
going on .


If I were able to change anything in FreeBSD , my first choice would be to
change these swirling characters to list explicit names of completed tasks
( or  starting tasks which operating system developers would know best
which one is more useful ) .


Thank you very much .


Mehmet Erol Sanliturk