I’m running Raspbian (2022-05-25-raspios-bullseye-arm64-hdmi-edid-bpi-m5-m2pro-sd-emmc.img.xz) and it has the best boot times. For my usage as embedded device I need to deactivate or at least hide all the boot messages. Usually this is very simple by defining another tty console in
/boot/cmdline.txt.
Changing “tty1” to “tty2” or “tty3” or something else in this line does not have any effect:
But I’m also open to any other solution as long as the boot time into a full-screen headless browser is less than 25s on a BPI M5.
I’m not a Linux expert, but if I understand it correctly, the bootloader is independent from the OS used, so I assume that the bootloader used here simply ignores the arguments in cmdline.txt. There seems to be a custom configuration in /boot/boot/boot.ini. These are the first lines:
bananapi_m5-UBOOT-CONFIG
# Default Console Device Setting
setenv condev "console=tty1 console=ttyS0,115200n8" # on both
When I change it to tty2, some output goes to tty2. The first about 2s of boot messages are still sent to tty1 (and /boot/cmdline.txt is being ignored completeley).
Have already tried armbian. Armbian has a slightly longer boot time, it also didn’t boot into desktop environment and I certainly didn’t manage to get chromium running (preferably headless without a desktop environment but requiring video playback).
Have also tried buliding a customized armbian image but I’m not experienced enough to configure it exactly to my needs. My most important requirement is the boot time. With Raspbian and my tweaks it’s about 15s from eMMC which is still ok.
I am not saying its perfect or that I am not biased, but it is IMO the best path for your use case and your level of technical knowledge.
There is absolutely no need to have a better boot time for a freely available general purpose OS. If you need a better boot time, you need to invest some time / money into R&D or invest 10 x more and move to fully custom OS development (buildroot / yocto), but as you said you are inexperienced forget about both those options and stick to Armbian which is far more on the normal user level. If you expect that presentation level software (Raspbian) will satisfy what you need … good luck.
This means you skipped 1st boot wizard which tells you that you need to create a normal username or desktop won’t start. It has bold red letters - hard to miss. Most of experienced Linux users are aware that Chromium will never start under root username. Probably there is possible to workaround it, but by default, no way. The same goes for desktop. Those are bare Linux essentials.
To achieve significant improvements here you need to completely rework boot process. Problem is the same, regardless of which Debian variant you will use: Raspbian, Armbian, Ubuntu.
Thank you very much for your detailed answer. I really appreciate your competence.
After my vacation I will take a look at Armbian again in the hope that I can adapt it even better to my needs with the knowledge I have gained so far. Will give it another try.
