On Thu, 10 Jan 2019 at 15:29, Carsten Haitzler <Carsten.Haitzler@arm.com> wrote:

Going through the BIOS means multiple minutes of waiting for stuff
hoping it finally boots, during which time I don't have a workstation to
do email or anything else on. I should time the boot but I think it's
about 5-10mins (and I'm too scared to reboot just to time it).

On our TX2 server, boot times were 3 minutes, but firmware upgrade
(7.0) made it 8 minutes. Turns out this is to do with the DDR tests
and here's how to move it back to 3 minutes:

https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4132

Before UEFI menu there's a message to "press 's' for setup". Do it, then:

CAVM_CN99xx# env set dbg_speed_up_ddr_lvl 1
CAVM_CN99xx# env save

Hope it helps,
--renato

It does seem to cut the "BIOS time" down to just under 4mins. Thanks! A full reboot cycle though from hitting "reboot" in my GUI to seeing my GUI logged on again is about 6mins still. The kernel spends something like 30 secs on boot just enumerating CPUs for example. It seems unable to bring up CPUs in parallel...