[Thinstation-general] questions about ThinStation netboot process, performance, diagnosis

[Todd P. <pf...@rh...>]

Hi ThinStation folks,

I'm running ThinStation-6, netbooting it via UEFI PXE, with the kernel and 
initrd loaded via HTTP.  That's all working ok, albeit slower than I 
expected.

The kernel vmlinuz file appears to load during boot in just a couple of 
seconds.

After that the remainder of the boot process takes another minute or so, 
and for most of that time all I see on the screen are the pxe boot 
messages in the top-left of the screen:

Fetching Netboot Image
Loading kernel ...
Loading initial ramdisk ...


After about a minute I finally see the ThinStation yellow progress bar 
show up for a split-second and then it disappears and all I see is a black 
screen until the boot is completed and my desktop session is running.

The initrd file is about 320MB so I wouldn't expect it to take more than a 
few seconds to load via http on a 1Gbps network.  In fact, if I wget the 
same file from the running thinstation, it takes about 3 seconds.

I also wouldn't expect the uncompressing of the initrd file and the 
remainder of the boot process to take as long as it is so I suspect 
something is going on that I can see because the boot process is mostly 
silent.

What can I do to better visualize the boot process?  I'm used to being 
able to press CTRL-ALT-Fn to get out of a linux graphical boot screen and 
see the kernel and init messages.  I haven't found a way to do this with 
TS6 but maybe I'm missing something.

Thanks,
Todd