Button-to-Grub times

[J]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 09:05, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> With Ubuntu 10.04's speedy bootup, it looks like the real bottleneck
> is now the time that the machine takes to get to the Grub screen and
> the Grub timeout itself. I would like to compile a list of machine's
> BTG (Button-to-Grub) times, the time (in seconds) that it takes to get
> to the Grub screen from the initial Power Button press. Next time you
> boot, please time this and reply with your machine's details
> (Desktops: motherboard, BIOS version and revision, hard drive(s);
> Notebooks: model and BIOS revision) and BTG time. Thanks!

Curious about why this matters... not that there's anything to be done
about button to grub times as that's entirely dependent on the
hardware, and what BIOS/EFI does at startup (whether it registers the
RAM, or scrubs the ram) and how long it takes any attached PCI devices
to activate...

I've had systems that, depending on data scrubbing, could take
anywhere from 5 minutes to 60 minutes to get to a login (gdm).

FWIW:

Alienware M15x, dmidecode says version A03 and says BIOS vendor is
Alienware (but it's a Phoenix BIOS, or at least based on one).

Power to Grub: 20 seconds
Grub to gmd: 32 seconds.

HDD is a 500GB SATA II drive.