Re: [Etherboot-developers] TFTP speed

[<ebi...@ln...>]

"James Newlin" <jn...@me...> writes:

> Hi. Not sure if this is the correct place of this post, forgive me if it is
> not.    It seems that the TFTP speed downloading a kernel from an Etherboot
> workstation using a standard 33.6 modem is very slow.  I know that 33.6kbps
> is nothing like 10 or 100-base-T, but we can see the send/recv LEDs blink
> very slowing, which makes us think that maybe there is some sort of sleep
> state in place.   The modems send/recv LEDs are on constantly after the
> kernel is loaded and booted up and the application is running.   Is there
> some sort of built in sleeps or maybe timeouts with TFTP-SERVER.0.17-9.RPM?
> Server is RedHat 7.2.      Would it be worth trying other TFTP servers?

TFTP is painfully synchronous.  In particular the  greater your latency
between send and receive the slower TFTP will go.

The options worth investigating are the TFTP block size option, and upping
your interface MTU.   It's a modem it has no natural MTU.  Together you should
be able to handle large packets and at least saturate your link.

Over 100Mbit I can boot in less than a second.

At best for a 2M kernel you are looking at 8 minutes over a 33.6 link.

What kind of speed are you seeing?

Eric