Boot Faster with 185Mb CD

[artsci2]

Just a little (sporadically known) trick here to serve as my first post:

If you use the smaller diameter CDs your Puppy will boot up faster and respond quicker in operations that use the CD. Most of the speed improvement is solely from the fact that the smaller diameter CDs spin up much quicker. This speeds up the access of the CD by several seconds in my system which typically takes much longer to spin up than it does to do the actual reading.

[zigbert]

A perfect first post. Give us more!!!

Sigmund

[alienjeff]

artscl2: Your post brought back some memories of fighting, begging and pleading with a dual-8" floppy drive I used with a Xerox 820 many moons ago. Thanks for the inadvertent chuckles!

-aj

[rrolsbe]

I can see where running from a smaller disk interactively and reading from a highly compressed file should be faster than from a larger/heavier cd media; however, the small cdr media is more expensive and other methods could be implemented to help with both the interactive (cd mounted) and cd unmounted modes. If the burning software or ISO editor software were able to fill the inter portion of the CD-R/DVD-R media with a space filling file, information could be read faster from the files on the outer portion. This should decrease the boot time when a large pup_21x remastered file (mine is over 200MB) is loaded into RAM at boot time. Anyone aware of a burning application that will calculate and fill the inter portion with a null file? If ISO editors allowed you to order the files, are the files maintained in order, IE... first file burned on the inside with successive files burned (in order) towards the outer portion of the CD/DVD.

Just my 2 cents, More thoughts welcome.
Regards
Ron

[Flash]

Hmm, very interesting. Lately I've been booting from a live CD, with a save file on a hard disk. Boot time is very fast that way. I ran from multisession DVD for a year or two, sometimes using the 8 cm DVD-RWs meant for camcorders. It never occurred to me to see if Puppy booted or ran faster from one of them than from a full-size DVD, but I'm pretty sure that booting is quicker from a DVD than a CD, all else being equal.

As for somehow tricking the drive into not using the inner part of the disk for the large files that are loaded at boot, it sounds like it ought to be possible but I don't have any idea if it could be done with the tools in Puppy.

[msumner]

Anyone aware of a burning application that will calculate and fill the inter portion with a null file? Ron

I have been thinking about this, but for another reason. Most of us have a pile of "coasters" from burning previous versions of puppy etc, and I wondered if nullifying the first burn would allow us to recycle these?

[Gekko]

Can't nullify a those burns, they use a pre-gap and such, not possible. You could open the iso in a hex editor, and just after the CD's header, add like 300mb of 00 00 00 or FF, can't remember which one is "nul" vs just zero, I believe FF is null. Anywho, you could try that
Or make a 300mb image with dd then combine it with the iso, dunno how well that would work though.

[rrolsbe]

From the Discjuggler user manual:

Optimize for CAV drives:Most newer drives use Constant Angular Velocity (CAV). This new technology causes the disc to spin at a constant angular speed. Before, disc drives used to be Constant Linear Velocity (CLV). The advantage of CAV is that drives do not need to constantly change speed and therefore they are simpler to produce, faster and cheaper. Since the data density on the disc is constant across the whole area, the "net" effect of CAV is that read speed on the inner edge of the disc is much slower that on the outer edge. This is why drive manufacturers often declare the read speed of their drives to be for example 14x-40x where 14x is the read speed at the beginning of the disc and 40x is the read speed at the outer edge.If the data disc that you are burning is not full by selecting this option you will allow DiscJuggler to generate an appropriate number of dummy (empty) blocks at the beginning of the recording process thus moving your data as close as possible to the outer edge disc where the read speed is highest.Additionally, you can using DiscJuggler's integrated disc layout to prioritize the files being written to disc. By doing this you can precisely place most important files on areas of the disc with the highest read speed.Keep in mind that you will be not able to add additional information to disc after writing with this option.

Regards
Ron

[rrolsbe]

Created two boot cd's one with the pup_216.sfs at located at sector 402 and the other located at sector 282,200, as per isobuster. Timed the load time while booting and the pup_216.sfs file load times were 44 seconds for both. During the verify portion of the burn process, using Nero, the speed varied from around 10X to over 25X. It appears puppy is somehow limiting the read speed to around 12X during the boot process or the pup_216.sfs file is not simply being copied from the CD into RAM.

One possible explanation could be that DMA is probably not enabled during the boot process. If true, any reason why DMA could not be enabled during the boot process?

UPDATE: Tried it on my V2000Z Compaq laptop and the 71MB pup_216.sfs loaded twice as fast, 20s versus 40s using the cd with the file moved towards the edge. DMA works on my Compaq but doesn't on either of my two work Dell models D610 or D810. NOTE: I did not fill the CD and the program I used to move the file towards the outside did not place it as the last file. If I could put my large pup_216.sfs at the very edge of the CD maybe my load times would be more than twice as fast. Now to find an easy way to do just that.

Lets get the boot time down guys!
Regards
Ron

[Crash]

Actually, I like the 185 Mb CDs because they fit nicely in my shirt pocket.

The last Puppy version I burned to a small CD was version 2.13. It booted in 1 minute 20 seconds vs. one minute flat for the same thing on a standard CD. This is with an Athlon XP 2400+ motherboard, 768 MB of RAM, and an AOpen 16x DVD writer. I used "puppy pfix=ram" when I did the timing test. Maybe the results depend on the CD reader. But I still like the little CDs - they're really portable.

[Lobster]

but I'm pretty sure that booting is quicker from a DVD than a CD, all else being equal.
.

I use RW-DVD's (I think they are about 3 times the price - still - but you can re-use them)
You are right Flash, DVD's are faster to read from and to write to

A DVD writer in an old computer and you have loads of secure storage capacity. Fast booting with Puppy. You can even use Lightscribe (make sure you have this capacity first) to burn / print onto special gold CD's

Barry advised that DVD is more reliable technology than CD's. I have no complaints.

[rrolsbe]

Looks like the files must be in alpabetical order on optical media; however, I did get the load time down to just over 10Sec with the 80MB pup_2.16.sfs file moved closer to the outer edge of my puppy boot DVD.

Now lets see if we can get Dougal to modify his custom remaster script to add the option of moving the remastered files to the outer edge of the optical boot media. I think an option to reduce the CD/DVD boot time by a factor of four is worth implementing. For more info regarding this topic read my previous posts in this thread.

Regards
Ron

[rrolsbe]

The following code is a quick hack I made on Dougal's remaster script. It uses the zdrv_216.sfs file that is already in the directory area to be remastered and makes several hard links. The idea is to create enough hardlinks of this file so we fill the CD/DVD boot disk and name them so they appear physically first on the media. Since I have not found the time to finish and test this enhancement to Dougals remaster script, I thought I would post this in case someone might want to take the ball and run with it.

NOTEs:
1. Hard links do not work on NON-UNIX partitions.
2. You must use the -no-cache-inodes switch in mkisofs because it is to smart.
3. My boot times were twice as fast for both CD and DVD media but your CD/DVD drive must support DMA to get this benefit.
4. Burn time is obviously increased and this method would only be used on NON-Multisession burns. IE... this will fill the disk so writing another session would not be possible.
5. What needs to be done is make the calculations to determine how many hard links of the selected file need to be created to fill either the CD or DVD media.
6. For more info see my posts in this thread.

Regards
Ron

##### create a script to do the work
echo '#!/bin/sh' > /tmp/new2cd.sh
#### Changed by rrolsbe
echo "ln $WKGDIR/zdrv_216.sfs $WKGDIR/00001.aaa" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
echo "ln $WKGDIR/zdrv_216.sfs $WKGDIR/00002.aaa" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
echo "ln $WKGDIR/zdrv_216.sfs $WKGDIR/00003.aaa" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
echo "ln $WKGDIR/zdrv_216.sfs $WKGDIR/00004.aaa" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
echo "ln $WKGDIR/zdrv_216.sfs $WKGDIR/00005.aaa" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
echo "ln $WKGDIR/zdrv_216.sfs $WKGDIR/00006.aaa" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
echo "ln $WKGDIR/zdrv_216.sfs $WKGDIR/00007.aaa" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
echo "ln $WKGDIR/zdrv_216.sfs $WKGDIR/00008.aaa" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
echo "ln $WKGDIR/zdrv_216.sfs $WKGDIR/00009.aaa" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
if [ "$CDCHOICE" = "ISO" ]; then
ISONAME="$WKGDIR/puppy-$PUPPYVERSION-remaster.iso"
echo "mkisofs -D -R -no-cache-inodes -o "$ISONAME" -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table $WKGDIR/" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
else
BURNERDRV="`Xdialog --left --title "Remaster Puppy2" --stdout --menubox "Please select the "$CDCHOICE" burner-drive to use." 0 48 4 $SELECTIONS 2> /dev/null `"
[ ! $? -eq 0 ] && exit
[ "$BURNERDRV" = "" ] && exit
BURNERDRV="`echo -n "$BURNERDRV" | cut -f 3 -d '/'`"
echo "BURNERDRV=$BURNERDRV"
case "$CDCHOICE" in
CD-R)
echo "mkisofs -D -R -no-cache-inodes -quiet -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table $WKGDIR/ | cdrecord -multi -tao -pad -data -v speed=4 gracetime=2 dev=ATAPI:/dev/$BURNERDRV -" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
;;
DVD-R)
echo "growisofs -speed=4 -Z /dev/$BURNERDRV -R -D -no-cache-inodes -quiet -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table $WKGDIR/" >> /tmp/new2cd.sh
esac
fi