[cgl_discussion] Project Review: Fast reboot

[Abbas, Mohamed]

Project Review for Fast Reboot
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1. The requirements from the requirements doc

Requirement: 4.7 Fast Boot-Up Time Enabling
Application Type: G, S, M
Description: OSDL CGL shall provide mechanisms to allow rapid booting of the
system. On
non-redundant systems, the total elapsed time of the reboot process once the
firmware has finished and given control to the kernel on a stand alone
machine
(not boot over the network) shall not exceed 30 seconds.


2. Explain how you think the project meets the
   above requirements.

   To speed up reboot process we adopted bootimg,
http://bootimg.sourceforge.net. It is an open source project that allow
kernel to boot another kernel. This process will bypass hardware and BIOS
steps in the boot process. We still need to optimize the boot time to meet
the required 30 second time by the requirement. Bootimg did optimize the
boot time by minimizing the boot loader time. We need to research now the
kernel initialization process during boot time to minimize the boot time.
Some of the area we might be interested in is hardware discovery, system
data and Bus scanning. We might skip some of these steps by getting the data
from the old kernel.  

3. Explain the design of the project or point to
   a document on the web that explains the design.
http://bootimg.sourceforge.net

4. Pointer to the code/patch.

http://cvs.developer.osdl.org/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/kernel/linux-2.4.18/patche
s/bootimg


Mohamed