IBM

I just picked up a 43p-150 to complement my pseries 630. I have AIX 5.3 installed and it's working pretty well. My only issue is the time it takes from me turning the machine on to actually seeing the IBM logo screen(this is even before AIX starts to boot). Is this normal? I didn't time it, but I am guessing it is about 4minutes from the moment I press the power button to actually seeing the IBM logo(and the hit "2" to use this console). After that, AIX boots up fairly quickly. If this is normal, is there any way to speed things up?

Normal.

I was doing AIX device driver debugging in the mid 1990s and boot time was 12 minutes in total, after taking note of the stack trace and hitting the power.. Even my 9114-275 takes I think about 5 to 7 minutes. My 7025 F80 takes considerable time also, possibly longer.

An AIX machine in a production environment is meant to be turned on and left running. When they are powered they do an inordinate amount of deep diagnostic checks. It goes through check points, if it stops at some point, the code on the LCD will tell you exactly where to look in the documentation. You tend to know when something is broken on a RS/6000.

You could try limiting the diagnostic checks in the boot options but I think literally decades ago I tried that and it didn't buy me much.

R.