[U-Boot] [PATCH 0/4] Accurate boot time measurement

Simon Glass sjg at chromium.org
Tue May 17 19:00:36 CEST 2011


On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Detlev Zundel <dzu at denx.de> wrote:
> Hi Simon and Wolfgang,
>
> [...]
>
>> In terms of all this discussion I can see your point :-) I did have
>> expressions of interest from two people including one I thought was at your
>> company, which I why I went to the effort to clean up and submit this. At
>> that time I didn't realise it would be such a touchy subject.
>
> I don't believe this topic to be touchy, it's just that Wolfgang trying
> to keep the whole code base in shape has a healthy inertia before
> introducing changes that may be difficult to keep consistent over the
> multitude of SoCs that we support.
>
> To throw in my personal view again, I still would like to see such an
> infrastructure to get into U-Boot code.  I fully agree with Wolfgang
> that practically the printfs and timing are a method already in place to
> do measurements.  On the other hand my experience has shown that for
> some reason or other this has never been widely used.  So effectively,
> it wasn't too helpful for the project itself.
>
> So I still believe that if we _had_ an infrastructure like you propose,
> we would get more people interested in _actually_ measuring and
> improving the code base, which would certainly be a good thing.
>
> Of course we have systems that are very limited in their ressources, but
> this is the reason why many features of U-Boot are opt-in features not
> forcing any resource usage on such boards.  So if some of them are so
> short on resources that they cannot use such a timing framework, then so
> be it.  But as most of the probably are in the legacy code base, they
> should not stop us from getting getting positive effects for the
> currently important boards and architectures.
>
> Cheers
>  Detlev

Hi Detlev and Wolfgang,

Thanks for your comments. I understand a little bit of healthy inertia
and do appreciate the constraints.

I believe I have covered this ground very thoroughly and would like
advice please on what to do next. The options I can see are:

- change the code to use a fallback when a microsecond timer is not available
- integrate with boot progress
- something else? drop it?

Regards.
Simon

>
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