Research topics in fastboot

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One Line Summary

Examine low hanging fruit for sub-second booting of systems

Abstract

There are many opportunities to improve the boot time of Linux systems. This talk will examine some of the more promising
1. Deferring initcalls. There is already a mechanism to run the initcalls for a module at module installation. This talk will examine how to extend that mechanism for built-in kernel subsystems to defer running the initcall off the fastpath.
2. Examine ways to start drivers in u-boot on multicore CPUs. The driver could run on a core in DSP mode until the kernel was ready to take over its responsibilities.
3. Parallelize CPU and I/O operations. Examples include decompressing the kernel in parallel with loading it, starting the mount of the rootfs early in kernel bringup, and preloading of applications.

Tags

embedded fastboot

Presentation Materials

slides

Speaker

  • John_face_square

    John Mehaffey

    Mentor Graphics

    Biography

    John Mehaffey has been working on embedded Linux since 1989. He is currently a Linux architect at Mentor Graphics working on fastboot.

    John designed real-time computers at Hewlett-Packard, and has a deep understanding of the boot and early system bringup process. John presented most recently at ELC about fastboot.