OT: Slow booting, was re: Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System

[Sean Caron]

For sure. When I quoted the 20 minute post time on new 4U machines earlier,
I didn't include the time the four HBAs on those particular machines spent
enumerating each one of the 360 drives connected ... only to poop out at
the end of the process anyway because it runs out of memory in a fixed data
structure and wants you to whack the space bar a bunch of times to
acknowledge the warning. Then the hardware RAID. And the PXE BIOS on the
NICs. And the configuration prompt for the management controller. Now they
want to bake UEFI into these things and the silly "lifecycle controller"
wants to drop in, take inventory and disconnect and what good that does me,
I will never know ...

Mostly it's an issue at deployment time; you are usually doing a few quick
reboots in succession when loading the system and, while I admit, patience
is definitely a virtue, watching these things POST can get frustrating when
you're at work and other stuff is going on in the mean-time. Once they're
up, they don't tend to get rebooted much.

Best,

Sean


On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 9:24 PM, Jay Jaeger <cube1 at charter.net> wrote:

> Aside from memory tests, in my experience, sometimes slowness can be
> caused by a disk controller ROM (often on a SCSI controller) that gets
> invoked during the POST that slows things down - particularly if it also
> enumerates what is on the SCSI bus.
>
> On 8/6/2015 7:35 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> > On the subject of slow booting, perhaps someone can help me with a very
> > annoying case of the slowboots.
> >
> > I've got a dual slot-1 P3 system here--a Supermicro P6DGE, which uses a
> > 440GX chipset and 2GB of registered SDRAM with two 900MHz CPUs.  When it
> > finally get around to s booting, it's a great workhorse, with 2,
> > count'em 2 well-behaved ISA slots.  It's frisky enough to run Windows 7
> > and proudly proclaims that it was made in the USA.
> >
> > The problem is, that even with the "Fast boot" BIOS setting, it takes
> > well over a minute to get to the point where it tries to boot.
> >
> > Does anyone have a clue on why it's so slow?  Even getting the POST down
> > to 15-20 seconds would be wonderful.
> >
> > --Chuck
> >
> >
>