AXON - Looking for options to optimize/reduce U-Boot boot time

General
1

The goal is to reduce the time spent in the U-Boot stage on the Vicharak AXON board.

Our current U-Boot boot log shows:

Total: 10809.252/11103.522 ms

Starting kernel ...

So approximately 10–11 seconds are being spent in U-Boot before the Linux kernel starts.

The kernel and initrd are loaded from eMMC, and the actual read times are relatively short:

/extlinux/extlinux.conf       24 ms
/initrd.img                   77 ms
/Image                       164 ms
/rk3588-axon...dtb            23 ms
/overlays/...dtbo              25 ms

For our production use case, eMMC is the primary/only boot source, so we are investigating whether unnecessary device probing, boot-menu handling, PCIe/NVMe detection, USB/SATA probing, etc. can be avoided.

Questions:

  1. Is there a recommended faster/minimal U-Boot configuration for an RK3588 board when booting exclusively from eMMC?
  2. Is there a recommended way to bypass the boot menu delay and directly execute the eMMC boot command for production builds?
  3. Are there any Rockchip-specific U-Boot options/configurations for reducing boot time that we should consider?
  4. How can we update or flash only U-Boot without having to reflash the entire eMMC image?

Any suggestions or recommendations for reducing the U-Boot portion of the boot time would be greatly appreciated.

2
  1. Yes, it can be possible by turning of PCIe/USB booting configuration.
  2. As you turn it off config of pcie/usb interface, it boot only from eMMC, and speed up the booting speed.
  3. I think above given suggestion will work.
  4. In Linux, using upgrade_tool, you can simply flash it directly, or you can make debian package of u-boot, than by simply install it using apt .

Working on Documentation part, will update by tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile you can see below uboot.

Source

Vicharak U-boot
Device Name : rk3588-axon

Flash-able image :

idbloader.img on sector 64
u-boot.itb on sector 16384