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125932
May 14th, 2013 14:00
PowerEdge R720 boot time excessive
The faster the machines get, the slower they boot!!! Why can't Dell make servers boot to Linux in 10-20 seconds? My Raspberry Pi boots faster. It would cost zero dollars, would delight your customers, and would make machines come back online faster after a power failure or crash. It takes a couple minutes to boot one of these R720s, but from a pure hardware perspective I don't see any reason why it couldn't be 3-5 seconds to just put the hardware in a known operating state and hand off to the OS boot loader. Nowadays Linux boots in about 10-20 sec (depending on whether SSD is used to boot it). The operating system resets all the hardware anyway, so why go through this lengthy startup procedure? What is particularly annoying:
- you wait N seconds for each component in case user wants to stop and edit settings for it, rather than just letting the user hit one key such as F2 that puts them into a menu where they can select all the different hardware settings to edit.
- you initialize components one-at-a-time. While it might be desirable in diagnostic modes to be able to do this, the normal mode of operation should be to initialize all components in parallel, and only those components that the operating system doesn't already initialize on its own! If a failure occurs in parallel initialization, fall back to serial initialization.
- bloatware should be banned at the BIOS level unless the user requests a menu (such as hitting F2). That's what we have operating systems for, to manage the hardware, so boot the operating system and let us manage it from there, unless the operating system won't boot or you actually need to change something at the BIOS level.
thanks for listening


ImSmart
7 Posts
1
May 16th, 2013 09:00
When you become a Dell BIOS programmer, you can bring this up to your team leader.
myowan
2 Posts
0
September 4th, 2013 07:00
love the idea of hitting one key and getting a menu during boot. I hate trying to remember which key combination I'm going to press when I'm booting and worrying that I'm going to hit the wrong one in the few second window I have
sjbnbn
1 Message
0
September 11th, 2013 17:00
Did you end up finding a solution for the slow boot on the R720's?
Can the Lifecycle Controller be disabled?
DELL-Rey G
3 Apprentice
•
1.1K Posts
0
September 13th, 2013 13:00
you can disable the Collect System Inventory on Reboot (CSIOR) for the LC, but thats not going to make it boot alot faster. It will save you about 20-30 seconds depending on the hardware configuration. You have to remember, the systems boot slowly because many devices have to boot their own internal code to pass onto the server. Its not like a desktop or laptop that only has a small amount of hardware.
wlazara
50 Posts
1
January 31st, 2017 23:00
I know this is an older thread but JFCOMG our 720xd servers take FOREVER to go through post (boot isn't that bad, but to POST and get to the actual boot process takes an INCREDIBLY long time). Our 730xd servers do not have this problem. I would say the 730xd post is about a minute and a half tops, and the 720xd must be *at least* 10 minutes. Absurd. Anyone find anything that helps the situation?
WobblyJeep
1 Message
0
August 17th, 2021 08:00
Coming from an HP enterprise world, Dell r7xx are slow, but the r720's are excessively slow.
r7xx's are so slow that I constantly miss my BIOS keys. i.e., F2, F11, CTRL+R, etc., etc. Cant forget the lovely, "Y" to confirm BIOS changes.
I have learned to deal with it; reminds me of a few 2-386's, but even slower.
/dead posts