Re: Grub2 EFI: Image loading from USB takes too long

[KESHAV P.R.]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 21:42, Aravind Srinivasan
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> Dint see any further response on this. So can I assume the block-io patch
> provided will become part of some official release ? If so, which one ? Do I
> need to log a bug for this ?
>
> Thanks,
> Aravind
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Aravind Srinivasan <address@hidden>
> To: The development of GNU GRUB <address@hidden>
> Sent: Tue, April 5, 2011 9:36:52 AM
> Subject: Re: Grub2 EFI: Image loading from USB takes too long
>
>
>
> Tried the block IO patch. It is much better than the current default 
> performance
>
> of 1.99. For the same initrd image (160M), loading from USB took approx 20 
> secs.
>
> I also tried changing the value of GRUB_DISK_CACHE_BITS from 6 to 8, and load
> time improved to approx 12 secs.
> Just to note, on Legacy Grub, this gets loaded almost in 3 secs.
>

Just FYI, in my VirtualBox 4.0.4 (EFI64 UEFI 2.1) test using archboot
iso, the x86_64 kernel (2,249,632 bytes) and iniramfs (55,628,934
bytes) (both lzma compressed) load time dropped from 240 seconds to
160 seconds with blockio patch and GRUB_DISK_CACHE_BITS set to 8 (bzr
mainline 3176). I don't know why there is still about 2 min load time
but since this occurs in a VM (and using virtual sata cd drive), i
guess it will be faster with a physical cd in real hardware.

I also tested the kernel and initramfs files (booting from HDD, not
CD) in DUET (UEFI 2.3 x86_64). Without the patch the load time was 63
seconds. With the patch (and GRUB_DISK_CACHE_BITS=8) the load time
dropped to 16 seconds. I did not check load time from an actual cd but
i guess it will be only slighly more due to cd access speeds. I have
not yet tested the same with Fedora grub-legacy efi.

Regards.

Keshav