I have a card cage board PC wth everything self contained on the board including CPU, RAM, Compact Flash card etc.
Under 6.1 when I booted, the time to boot the system was only a few seconds from the time of the detection of the compact flash card till I got a login prompt.
Now under 6.3 the boot time has increased to almost 2 full minutes which isn’t really acceptable.
What happens when I boot is that I get to the prompt where it says ‘hit ESC for .altboot’ just fine (a couple seconds into the boot). But right after that as devb-eide starts I notice a huge difference from 6.1. Several screens of spew are printed to my screen. By spew I mean all kinds of info/warning messages. At the end of that it finds my compact flash card. This takes about 1-3 seconds for the spew to finish/detect my compact flash card. Then instead of booting from the compact flash card, the cursor sits there twiddling slowly for about 2 full minutes. At the end of that time the OS goes on to attempt to start a pile of other drivers (devb-aha*, debv-ncr etc etc) all of which take less than a second to return failure since those devices are not present. Then finally the OS decides to boot from the compact flash card, mounts the drive and continues on to boot successfully.
My question is, why is devb-eide sitting there for a full 2 minutes and what’s it trying to locate during that time when it already has a bootable device (the compact flash)?
For what it’s worth, the compact flash is located on the Secondary Master IDE channel instead of the Primary one. There are no other devices on any IDE channel besides the flash card. Of course this worked in 6.1 so I assume it can’t be because it’s on the secondary master or can it???
Also if I attach a QNX harddrive to the primary master IDE channel the whole thing boots up in a few seconds and gives me the option to mount either the HD or Compact Flash as the root file system.
If I do a devb-eide & from the command prompt I get the same spew I get at boot time but of course I can’t capture that output to post here because devb-eide forks itself into the back ground (is there any way to redirect that output?).
In any case it seems to me that devb-eide finishes it’s scan in a couple of seconds but then hesitates to decide what to boot from for some reason.
Should I go into my build file for .boot and specifically start devb-eide myself there with some parameters (currently I let the OS start it itself) and if so, which ones?
Lastly, I have turned off DMA access in diskboot in the .boot image otherwise QNX fails entirely to detect the flash card.
Thanks,
Tim