[Elinux-discuss] How to start multi-entity embedded work on specific topics? (boot time, for example)

[Bird, Tim]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert Schwebel <r.schwebel at pengutronix.de>
> On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 09:33:04PM +0000, Bird, Tim wrote:
> > Does anyone else want to chime in with any pros and cons with this
> > approach? For example, could buildroot developers and users utilize
> > information, patches, tools, etc. stored in YP this way? Or would
> > this stuff be off their radar?
> 
> Taken the fact that yocto is the de-facto standard build system for many
> projects these days, I would say a yocto layer is a valid option for
> storing this kind of information.
> 
> At Pengutronix, most of our projects are based on yocto, ptxdist and
> some variant of debian these days (in this order). If the information is
> not burried deeply in some yocto magic, it's usually easy to extract it
> for the other build systems if necessary.

Thanks.  This is very useful feedback.

> 
> The bigger challenge will be to convince the respective upstream
> projects that boot time optimization is a value and not traded against
> developer convenience. IMHO, boot time optimization methods will only
> have a chance if they are easy to use. You can always optimize a system
> in a pathologic way, so it is fast but not easy-to-update any more.

Yes.  It's sometimes challenging to get boot time reductions upstream,
because you end up specializing the boot process for a particular board,
use case, or market.  It is best to try to find technologies that can
be easily utilized by developers working on boot time reduction, and
get the technologies upstream.  It's even better if you can provide some
tools to automate customizations of the system.  For example, it would
be nice to have a tool that took a snapshot of the device nodes to define
them statically, in order to avoid  probing and adding always-present ones
during system initialization.  Also nice would be a tool to identify device
drivers which could be loaded later in the initialization sequence, and marking
them for deferred loading.

Thanks again for the response.  It should be a good discussion at Plumbers.
 -- Tim