Slow deployment with VS2015 on FlashDisk

Technical Support
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1

I deploy a C# project from Visual Studio 2015. On one Colibri this takes 20sec, on the other Colibri this takes 2min. How can one explain the difference?

Details:

  • Colibri A: iMX6DL 512MB IT V1.0B MCIMX6U7CVM08AB
  • Colibri B: iMX6DL 512MB IT V1.0B MCIMX6U7CVM08AB (identical to A)

Colibri A and B prepared like so:

  • placed in Colibri Evaluation Board V 3.2B
  • loaded Toradex EasyInstaller V1.5-20180507 into RAM
  • put in USB stick and installed EasyInstaller Image iMX6_WinCE8Image-Tezi_1.3.1-20180522
  • Rebooted

on the laptop:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2015 Version 14.0.25431.01 Update 3
  • Solution in C# containing ca. 50 projects
  • Colibri rebooted, after startup select Start - Programs - ColibriTools - “Start debugger client” and click OK
  • deployment of the Startup project on Colibri A takes 20 sec
  • deployment of same project on Colibri B takes 2 min
  • The deployment time is measured from “Installing the application…” to “Updating information related to installed files…” in the Build Output window
  • project properties - Debug: Remote Path is FlashDisk\Startup
  • project properties - Debug: Clear the remote folder is checked

I suspect the file system on the flash disk of colibri B is slower compared to colibri A. How can this be?
I verified both colibris have L2 cache enabled and MultiProcessor disabled.

The bootloader output:

Toradex Bootloader 1.3.1 for iMX6 Built May 22 2018
Splash screen is enabled.
SPL enabled version.
Using 16MB of IPU memory and 32MB of GPU memory.
Board: Colibri iMX6 DualLite 512MB IT
CPU is running at 792MHz.
Using eMMC boot partition (size: 4096 sectors).
Initializing L2 Cache.

Press [SPACE] to enter Bootloader Menu

Initiating image launch in 0 seconds. 
System ready!
Preparing for download...
Loading compressed image...
Reading image from sector 40962.
Extracting 38443144 bytes from compressed image of 24074300 bytes
......................

Done.
Launching image at 10200000.
2

This is quite puzzling.
You may be right about filesystem, to test this you can try to copy multiple files (few hundred MBs) from USB disk to Flashdisk.
It may also be slow network interface. To test this you may try to deploy your application on the object store (any folder not mapped to mass-storage) or use the FTP server on the device to transfer files to/from it.

3

Copying 15 files with a total size of 609MB manually (with mouse in File Explorer) from USB HD\Startup to FlashDisk\Startup takes on Colibri B 20min. if pex.l2enable is set to false. If I set pex.l2enable to 1, it takes 10min.
On Colibri A with pex.l2enable set true, it takes 2min.
Also, on Colibri B Desktop, the “Recycle Bin” and the “My Device” icons in the upper left corner are 1/3 the size of the Colibri A icon size??? Letter size is ok and also background “Toradex CE8” letters are ok in size, also Start menu ok.

4

Are both modules same HW release (you can find it on the sticker with serial no)?
Can you try to reinstall the OS on the slow module erasing flash first (there is an option to do this in the easy installer main toolbar).

5

Both modules are same HW release.

Yes, selecting “Erase Flash (c)” before installing CE8 did the trick!
Visual Studio deployment has normal speed again and file copy operations also.

=> I will add the “erase” Property also to our custom image.json files as explained in https://developer.toradex.com/software/toradex-easy-installer#block-devices.

Thank you!