5 ms·
I hate FORTH as a general purpose environment, and I've seen a lot of FORTH-based train wrecks written by FORTH fanatics. But FORTH really, really shines in the
by kabdib 9y ago
I hate FORTH as a general purpose environment, and I've seen a lot of FORTH-based train wrecks written by FORTH fanatics. But FORTH really, really shines in the boot environment, it's a fantastic tool for setting up hardware and gluing things together.
As for the arguments that it's got poor performance, I'd like to point out that the BIOS / UEFI based systems on most of the systems I work with take minutes to POST, tens of minutes for the bigger machines, and I think it's a clear case of not looking critically at their own work.
- jandrese 9y agoMy favorite is waiting 8-10 minutes for UEFI to finish whatever the hell it is doing to have exactly one second to hit the appropriate F key to get into the boot options.
- exikyut 9y agoOn servers, I presume?
- userbinator 9y agoThat's probably due to a very thorough memory test, and it's not particular to UEFI either --- I have worked with older servers, with regular BIOS, that do the same thing. There may be an option to disable it.
- exikyut 9y agoMakes sense. I should hope there is such an option, for OS/boot debugging etc!!
- kabdib 9y agoMemory tests are a big part of it, but definitely not the only really slow component. (The 10+ minute boot time on our bigger servers already is the fast version of the memory test. I've never turned on the more exhaustive one).
- exikyut 9y agoYeow! What are the other tests? I mean, there's the CPU, memory, the disks, PCI... surely you don't have SCSI, option ROMs should be quick... I'm genuinely curious. What sort of server is it, for reference? (Well, I'm really just wondering how much RAM it has.) And now I'm wondering how long the longer test takes!
- jandrese 9y agoIBM x3550 M3s were really bad about this. They aren't crazy big servers--dual CPU, 32GB RAM, just a couple of disks. UEFI boot took forever for no discernible reason.
- rootw0rm 9y agoUEFI + hardware RAID can be especially annoying.