[OE-core] wic creates ext4 images that read really slow in u-boot

[Andre McCurdy]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 9:13 AM Leon Woestenberg <leon at sidebranch.com>
wrote:

> Hello Mike,
>
> sounds familiar.
>
> On Tue, 19 Feb 2019 at 17:55, Mike Looijmans <mike.looijmans at topic.nl>
> wrote:
>
>> Took me a while to figure out why my board took 90 seconds to boot
>> suddenly.
>>
>> The issue turned out to be the ext4 partition created by wic.
>
>
> I suspect it's not WIC's fault.
>
>
>> ZynqMP> load mmc 0:2 0x100000 /lib/firmware/fpga.bin
>> 19311092 bytes read in 85529 ms (219.7 KiB/s)
>>
>> Now if I boot the board rename and copy that file onto itself, then it's
>> suddenly normal again when I reboot the board:
>>
>> ZynqMP> load mmc 0:2 0x10000
>> I'm not knowledgeable on ext4, so any ideas what's being passed onto the
>> image
>> creation tool that causes this?
>
>
> I suspect your version of U-Boot does not handle files spread across
> multiple filesystems (allocation) extends efficiently.
>
> Copying the file makes the copy being layed out in one extend probably.
>

If WIC is generating filesystem images from scratch there's no excuse for
files to be unnecessarily fragmented.

Even if some of all of the boot time can be recovered by a patch to u-boot
that won't help systems which have already been deployed and don't have a
way to update the bootloader.

I am aware of two fixes for U-Boot. I will look them up, and reply again to
> this thread.
>
> Regards, Leon
> --
> Leon Woestenberg
> leon at sidebranch.com
> T: +31 40 711 42 76
> M: +31 6 472 30 372
>
> Sidebranch
> Embedded Systems
> Eindhoven, The Netherlands
> http://www.sidebranch.com
>
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