Boot animation

[Bernardo Innocenti]

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> Current boot timings are roughly:
>  0m2s until the screen turns on
>  0m10s until OFW starts transferring control to linux (roughly)
>  0m25s seconds to linux userland (/init in initrd)
>  1m0s to X startup
>  1m25s to sugar's home display is fully up.
> 
> These are all subject to change -- I'm sure we will continue to try to
> reduce the time for each stage as much as possible.  But at the moment
> there's a brief opportunity for animation from about 2s to 10s, then
> we must hold in a static image until the 25s mark.  In theory, we
> could access the child's colors at the 25s mark, but it becomes much
> easier if we wait a little longer.  It is very easy once X is started.
>  There's another static period between X startup and when sugar is
> sufficiently loaded to take over animation.  At the moment that occurs
> between 1m and 1m25s, but there are various proposals to push X
> startup earlier in the boot sequence, and hopefully we can reduce
> sugar startup time further to reduce the static period.

I don't see no problem starting X very early.  Dependencies that come
to my mind are:

 - /proc and maybe /sys
 - udev (for /dev entries)
 - hal & dbus (for X 1.4 input autoconfiguration)

We could run olpc-dm from an init script instead of right from init.
This way we loose automatic respawning of X when it dies, but that
was more frustrating than useful ;-)

I guess this would bring X up within 0m35s...

BTW, setting LANG=C in /etc/sysconfig/i18n saves 5 seconds of boot
time.  I think J5 has already done that the latest builds.

-- 
   //  Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
 \X/ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/