BeagleBoard Fast Boot

Hui Chen Keji Ren

Dec 10th, 2009

EE382N-4 Project

Outline
Motivation Objectives Hardware of BeagleBoard Techniques in optimizing boot time Boot time result Conclusions Future work Live demo

EE382N-4 Project

Motivation:
Why Faster Boot Time?
Boot time definition: Time from turning on power to a shell welcome prompt (or a GUI).

Impact the first perception an end user has of the product Critical to obtain a positive end user experience Save power

EE382N-4 Project

Objectives
Optimize software in BeagleBoard for speed 1. bootloader 2. Linux Kernel 3. user-space applications

Achieve a 5-second fast boot time in BeagleBoard. Original boot time second was about 15 seconds.

EE382N-4 Project

BeagleBoard Hardware
OMAP 3530 Processor 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 with NEON A8 256MB on-chip RAM 256MB NAND Flash Peripheral I/Os DVI-D, SD/MMC+, S-Video, USB 2.0 Video, Stereo In/Out, RS232 Serial Power USB or 5V DC

EE382N-4 Project

Serial Cable Setup

We made a customized Null Modem cable to connect BeagleBoard to PC's serial port.

EE382N-4 Project

Boot Sequence

EE382N-4 Project

Strategies
Load from NAND Flash
X-loader/u-boot loading speed in SVC32 cpu mode: NAND = 1MB, MMC = 500KB/s boot NANDs block size is 128 KB per reading. We modified x x-loader to only load 2 blocks (instead of 7 blocks originally).

Remove unnecessary initialization, integration check and data movement

We modified u-boot to 1. Embed configuration environments into u u-boot (instead of reading from NAND) 2. Turn off Kernel CRC check 3. Remove Kernel relocation in u-boot (skip the 64 boot 64-byte header of Linux image)

EE382N-4 Project

Strategies (cont.)
Reduce user response time
1. Set bootdelay to zero in u-boot (so user can't interrupt u boot u-boot) 2. Turn off serial output by passing 'quiet' parameter to Kernel

Reduce code size

(x-loader, u-boot, kernel and We used '-Os -mthumb'' flag to compile all code (x user-space applications). Code size wins hands down. space

Remove unnecessary functionalities in Kernel and avoid modules

We compiled a 1.2MB 2.6.29 Kernel with USB, network, ext3/JFFS2 and a driver for our Pegasus USB Ethernet adapter.
EE382N-4 Project

Strategies (cont.)
User-space optimization
1. Build Linux rootfs from scratch. By carefully tuning uclibc and busybox, we reduced total size of rootfs to about 780KB without losing desired features. 2. Minimize init script: disable syslogd and klogd, remove unused tty and rc scripts.

Choose faster file system

Ext3 needs journal daemon whose loading time varies (can be over one second). Instead we use Ext2. We didn't choose JFFS2 on NAND due to the buggy Linux driver.

EE382N-4 Project

Boot Time Result

[ 0.000005] < 0.000005> Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.2 (Dec 8 2009 - 23:36:42) Loader [ 0.003808] < 0.003803> Loading u-boot.bin from nand [ 0.228279] < 0.224471> [ 0.228349] < 0.000070> [ 0.232136] < 0.003787> U-Boot 2009.06-rc2-dirty (Dec 08 2009 - 23:47:30) dirty [ 0.232178] < 0.000042> [ 0.239877] < 0.007699> OMAP3530-GP ES3.0, CPU-OPP2 L3-165MHz 165MHz [ 0.239932] < 0.000055> OMAP3 Beagle board + LPDDR/NAND [ 0.239959] < 0.000027> DRAM: 256 MB Boot time was measured by using ptx_ts script from host [ 0.251298] < 0.011339> NAND: 256 MiB Linux PC: [ 0.259473] < 0.008175> In: serial $ picocom --b 115200 -d 8 /dev/ttyS0 | ptx_ts 'Texas' [ 0.259526] < 0.000053> Out: serial [ 0.259545] < 0.000019> Err: serial Total boot time from power on to terminal welcome [ 0.263444] < 0.003899> Board revision C prompt is 2.92 seconds without network. [ 0.263485] < 0.000041> Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0 [ 0.267380] < 0.003895> [ 0.271382] < 0.004002> NAND read: device 0 offset 0x280000, size 0x123000 [ 1.551374] < 1.279992> 1191936 bytes read: OK [ 1.555640] < 0.004266> ## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at 80007fc0 ... [ 1.561426] < 0.005786> Loading Kernel Image ... OK [ 1.561455] < 0.000029> OK [ 1.565348] < 0.003893> [ 1.565392] < 0.000044> Starting kernel ... [ 1.565410] < 0.000018> [ 1.895363] < 0.329953> Uncompressing Linux.............................................................................. don booting the done, kernel. [ 2.923280] < 1.027917> Please press Enter to activate this console.

EE382N-4 Project

Boot time composition

Delay (second) Loading u-boot from NAND Loading Kernel from NAND Execution (x-loader + u-boot) Uncompressing Kernel Execution (Kernel) Mounting Memory Card User-space applications Total 0.22 1.28 0.06 0.73 0.29 0.27 0.07 2.92

EE382N-4 Project

Conclusions
We achieved shorter boot time than we expected expected. We established a website with wiki pages, all modified source code and binaries: http://code.google.com/p/swiftbeagle/ We obtained a good understanding on 1. BeagleBoard hardware 2. What are required in writing a bootloader (such as disabling MMU/dcache, detecting machine ID and passing ATAGS to Kernel). We wrote our own bootloader called S-Boot. However, development of S-Boot is still in debugging phase and Kernel stalls after uncompressing itself. 3. Patching Kernel source 4. Building a Linux rootfs from scratch 5. Compiler optimization techniques (we believe we found a defect in Code Sourcery's latest ARM gcc compiler/library)

EE382N-4 Project

Future Work: What Would Be Different?

0.5 second boot can be realized by utilizing XIP(Execution in Place), faster NAND driver, uncompressed Kernel and faster FS(JFFS2 on MTD).

Delay (second) Loading u-boot from NAND Loading Kernel from NAND Execution (x-loader + u-boot) Uncompressing Kernel Execution (Kernel) Mounting Memory Card User-space applications Total 0.22 1.28 0.06 0.73 0.29 0.27 0.07 0.42

Optimization to use XIP/driver XIP/driver

uncompressed Kernel

faster FS/driver

EE382N-4 Project

Demo Time

EE382N-4 Project