performance enhancements for embedded software

ssubbarayan wrote:
> I am working in a consumer electronics device related software
> development where I was asked to reduce the bootup time.

Boot time is becoming more of a problem as more and
more appliances take "off" to mean zero current flow,
not just suspend.  Here are two related ideas.

Off-load as much of the UI as possible to a single
chip controller.  They boot in a blink and as long as
the UI is mostly useable, the consumer won't notice
the actual boot time of the appliance.  For example,
you could have the displays and buttons on a DVD player
controlled by an AVR.  Immediately on power-on, the
consumer can press the Open-Drawer button and have the
drawer open.  By the time the consumer gets the DVD in
and spun up, the rest of the appliance is up and ready
to go.

The second idea is just the first but carve out a piece
of the main processor to do the UI.  Say you're using
Linux and an ARM processor.  Immediately after boot you
can allocate a timer and its interrupt to poll the UI
hardware and respond to the user.  You need to "hide"
this timer and interrupt from the Linux boot process
until Linux is fully up and can take over the full UI.
"Hiding" a timer and interrupt from Linux is NOT a
trivial task and, sad to say, I don't know of anyone
who's tried this approach.


Good luck with your project and don't forget to post
your approach so we can all learn from it.

Bob Smith