Re: Speeding up autoconf on PCs

[Andrew Doran <ad%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 03:32:05AM +0200, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> On Sat, 29 Mar 2008, Andrew Doran wrote:
> >This patch uses kthreads to absorb delays during autoconf, speeding up the
> >boot process quite a bit. Comments?
> 
> I can't test it, but I'm curious - can you tell by what factor/percentage 
> this is sped up?

I don't know but along with the other changes that have been made, boot of
the x86 GENERIC kernel on a system with IDE disks is much quicker than 4.0.
On my workstation it's under 10 seconds including time to load the kernel.

> From looking at the code, I wonder if 8 threads give a 8-times speedup?

It really depends on what kind of hardware is in the machine but it's
certainly not going to give an 8x speedup to the whole process.

> Also, why 8?

No special reason - it seems not to many, not too few. :-)

Andrew