How to speed up booting?

QNX USERS QNX6 - OS
#1

On MOXA DA-683, QNX booting is somewhat slowly, especially at the stage of scanning for devices of SATA ahci and EIDE. It spends 30 seconds to boot up. Because DA-683 will be used in substation automation system, so the acceptable time should be 10 seconds.

There is another problem. DA-683 has no sound card. During booting, it will display a message:
mount: Can’t mount / (type io-audio)
mount: Possible reason: Invalid argument

So my questions are how to skip starting io-audio, and is there any method to speed up booting?

Allen

#2

I’m guessing that you are a .boot file created from a standard build file. This is slowed down by the process of discovering hardware dynamically. In particular, there is a program called diskboot that tries to discover any of a number of controllers and any disks connected to them.

A good way to start the process of replacing this program is to do a “pidin arg” after the system has started. This will give you a starting point for drivers you need to start manually.

Also check the parameters of the disk driver you will be using, as you can tell the driver to not scan, but instead look for disks in specific places.

This takes some patience as well as trial and error.

#3

Thank you for your reply.
I have comment all lines in /etc/system/enum/devices/audio, now there is no mount failure message from io-audio output.
Run pidin arg, and redirect to a log file, I can see the steps of devb-ahci and devb-eide. In fact there is no ahci device. How to skip the enumerating for ahci?
I worry incorrect modification will cause Neutrino not able to start.

Allen

#4

There is a non-ahci version of the kernel, proc.

#5

The approach taken is wrong. The automatic hardware enum process is leftover from the idea of QNX as a self-hosted development system on PCs.

For an embedded system, you should simply use your own build file, starting from “bios.build”. In the boot script you only start the drivers you need (look at what gets started by the enumeration). Without all the detection and scanning, your boot will be much faster.