Threaded Device Probing

This page describes Threaded device probing, which is a feature which
allows drivers in the Linux kernel to have their probes execute in
parallel threads. One of the most time-consuming parts of the boot up
sequence is the probing by device drivers for their hardware devices.

This patch was created by Greg Kroah-Hartman and with it he was able to
reduce the bootup time of the kernel on one machine by about 400
milliseconds.

Original post and discussion

See this article for the original
description of this and a patch.

There was discussion about this
here.

Kernel Option

Greg Kroah-Hartman posted a patch to LKML on Sep 25 2006 with a config
option to turn this on for the PCI bus. His post is at: lkml
thread

The kernel option to turn on this feature for the PCI bus in Linux
version 2.6.18-rc4-mm1 (Andrew Morton’s tree) is
CONFIG_PCI_MULTITHREAD_PROBE.

Status

This code was apparently never integrated into mainline. It appears to
be superceded by the Asynchronous function
calls work.

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