Booting FreeBSD on an EC2 c5.xlarge instance, the loader "twiddles"
810 times over the course of 510 ms, a rate of 1.59 kHz. Even accepting
that many systems are slower than this particular VM and will take
longer to boot (especially if using spinning-rust disks), this seems
like an unhelpfully large amount of twiddling when compared to the
~60 Hz frame rate of many displays; printing the twiddles also consumes
roughly 10% of the boot time on the aforementioned VM.
Setting the default globaldiv to 16 dramatically reduces the time spent
printing twiddles to the console while still twiddling at roughly 100
Hz; this should be ample even for systems which take longer to boot and
consequently twiddle slower.
Note that this can adjusted via the twiddle_divisor variable in
loader.conf, but that file is not processed until nearly halfway
through the loader's runtime.
Sponsored by: https://www.patreon.com/cperciva
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D32163
(cherry picked from commit 7457840230)
Document "NO" special value for the autoboot_delay and move the
description to loader.conf.5.
imp reworked some of the wording from danger's patch.
Reviewed by: imp
PR: 85128
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D11887
(cherry picked from commit 71f6aea415)
The origin text was: "Syntax for devices is odd."
That is not very helpful.
PR: 199103
Reviewed by: kevans, tsoome
Sponsored by: Klara Inc.
Event: July 2020 Bugathon
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D25629
after opening the console, replacing init as PID 1.
From the user point of view, it makes it possible to run eg the
shell as PID 1, using 'set init_exec=/bin/sh' at the loader(8)
prompt.
Reviewed by: kib
MFC after: 2 weeks
Relnotes: yes
Sponsored by: DARPA, AFRL
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D16625
The latter matches the rest of the tree better [0]. The UPDATING entry has
been updated to reflect this, and the new tunable is now documented in
loader(8) [1].
Reported by: imp [0], Shawn Webb [1]
Remove all cross references to zfsloader.8 and /boot/zfsloader.
Move ZFS specific info into loader.8.
Sponsored by: Netflix
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D16361
Perhaps RB_MUTE could mute user startup (rc) output as well, but right
now it mutes only kernel console output, so make the documentation match
reality.
PR: 228193
Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation
