`make ramroot` wiped the objects on the way in, and nothing wiped on the
way out. So a plain `make` afterwards kept every RAMDISK_ROOT object and
linked the 24 MB ramdisk back into a kernel that no longer used it: 25 MB
where a clean build is 836 KB. It still booted -- from the ramdisk -- and
the only outward symptom was stage2 having thirty times as much to load
through PIO, one sector at a time. That is the "booting got slower"
report this came from.
A stamp file records which setting the objects were built with, and the
tree is dropped when it changes in either direction.
qemu-kvm is opt-in and the default stays TCG, because the suite's timings
were established there. Measured with the guest timing itself,
`ls /bin | wc -l` goes 2.9s -> 1.1s. Boot does not improve and gets
slightly worse: every PIO port access in stage2 is a VM exit under KVM.
Retracts a claim from earlier today. The "2.2x speedup" attributed to the
region-based allocator was a measurement artifact -- the probe sent a
command, slept a fixed 50s on the host, then read /proc/uptime, so it
timed the sleep rather than the command, through a guest clock that drifts
under load. Bracketing the command inside one guest command line shows no
measurable difference. The e820 change is still correct; it is simply not
a performance change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three bugs, all of which surfaced as a failed check somewhere other than
the command that was actually slow.
Wait-Prompt waited a fixed 20 s. These tests run under TCG, not KVM, and
a cold `ls /bin | wc -l` takes 23 s on the Fedora laptop measured with
the guest's own /proc/uptime -- it was over the wall every time. Raised
to 60 s; a long timeout only costs time when something is genuinely
wrong, a short one costs a false failure elsewhere.
It also matched a prompt anywhere in the transcript. Between writing a
command and the guest echoing it the log still ends with the previous
prompt, so it could return before the command had started and the next
one was typed on top of it. Anchor the match to text produced after the
command was sent.
On timeout it slept two seconds and typed regardless, which is what
turned one slow command into an interleaved transcript and a failure
attributed to a later check. Wait for output to stop arriving instead.
Report any command that never produced a prompt next to the result:
after one overrun every later check is reading a transcript that may be
interleaved, and that should not be something you have to notice in the
scrollback.
With this, -Fb -Tty -Usb -Sock -Evdev -Ps is 108 [ok], 0 misses.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Records the measured effect of the region-based allocator (2.2x on a cold
ls, 6 s off the boot), the two pre-existing UEFI blockers found while
verifying it, and the three confounds that each produced a confident
wrong answer about guest speed in one session.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
