About SpeedBoot

SpeedBoot is an optimization tool built on top of build systems (e.g. Buildroot) intended to minimize delay to main application start-up. In order to achieve this, SpeedBoot uses a similar GUI to Buildroot. It needs additionally measured package information (boot up delay time ...), which must be provided separately. As start-up time can be significantly improved, it may cause several drawbacks like a possible loss of functionality and stability of the system.

System requirements

SpeedBoot is designed to run on Linux systems on top of Buildroot. While Buildroot itself will build most host packages it needs for the compilation, certain standard Linux utilities are expected to be already installed on the host system. Below you will find an overview of the required packages (note that package names may vary between distributions).

• Buildroot
• gperf
• Bison
• flex
• ncurses (both runtime and development data must be provided)
• Dia (optional: allow generation of graphs in Doxygen)
• graphviz (optional: allow generation of graphs in Doxygen)

Quick start

Important: it should be possible to build the complete project as a normal user. There is no need to be root user to configure and use SpeedBoot. By running all commands as a regular user, you protect your system against misbehaving packages during compilation and installation. In general, SpeedBoot runs on top of Buildroot, but allows customers to provide additional package information, which must be provided in the 'Config.in' file.

1.) If not already existing, define a 'Config.in' file in the SpeedBoot directory.

2.) Define 2 variables in the 'start.sh' file in the SpeedBoot directory: BUILDSYSTEM and BSPATH - e.g:

    BUILDSYSTEM=buildroot
    BSPATH=/path_to_buildroot_directory

3.) Execute the 'start.sh' file.

'Config.in' file

The 'Config.in' file in the SpeedBoot directory provides package information for configuration, in addition to the default 'Config.in' files in Buildroot. The information is platform-dependent and must be provided by the user. The 'Config.in' file is the input for the configuration tool used in Buildroot, which is the regular Kconfig. For further details about the Kconfig language, refer to http://kernel.org/doc/Documentation/kbuild/kconfig-language.txt

Furthermore, the following additional package information should be provided in this file for the estimatation of the optimum start-up time:

• timeexact
• timecoarse
• sizeexact
• sizecoarse

e.g.:

    config USER_ATTR
      timeexact "1.1234"
      sizeexact "3.1"

In this way, a summary about selections count, package sizes and start-up times can be shown during the configuration process. Also the configuration can be continuously adapted.