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

[Don C. <don...@ya...>]

I am not sure which boot loader you are using, but regardless, boot loaders often have to use interrupts to get things done. This makes them slower than a regular OS. I developed a technique for breaking the initrd up into two pieces. All the code required to boot is in the small piece about 29mb, and everything else in the second part. It's called fastboot. It's weird and makes things hard to debug, but it does speed up booting. 

You could add 
"vt.global_cursor_default=1 systemd.show_status=true rd.systemd.show_status=true"
to your kernel cmd line.








On Tuesday, April 5, 2022, 01:17:25 AM PDT, Todd Pfaff <pf...@rh...> wrote: 





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


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