Re: 2.6.25 slow boot/reboot

[Ken Moffat <zarniwhoop@ntlworld.com>]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 05:23:57PM +0200, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Sergio Luis <sergio@larces.uece.br> wrote:
> >  This weekend I got some time and decided to try out 2.6.25, but its booting process was _really_ slow in my laptop[1]. With 'old' 2.6.24.5 my machine would take about 48 secs until it gave me the login prompt. And it would take about 22 seconds to reboot.
> 
> Do you use LILO or GRUB for booting ? 2.6.25 works OK on the systems I
> tested, but LILO really needs a lot of time to load the 2.6.25 kernel.
> GRUB loads the 2.6.25 kernel at normal speed.
> 
> Bart.
 ISTR that an _old_ version of lilo was mentioned earlier in this
thread.  As a datapoint, on my one desktop box which uses lilo (an
athlon64 uniprocessor) both 32 and 64-bit 2.6.25 kernels boot fine.
Both of those systems are with lilo-22.8, and gcc-4.2.2.

 But, I think you (Bart) haven't said which version of lilo you are
using ?  If it isn't recent, perhaps upgrading it might help ?

 For Sergio, you have my sympathy.  I totally failed to bisect my own
problem with 2.6.25-rc (and 2.6.24.1), although I did find the problem
by other means, and got a work-around, so I'm not competent to
diagnose what is wrong, but maybe I can help to tease out what is
different about your box.  As a start, you could try diffing your
config's for 2.6.24.5 and 2.6.25 in case something odd has changed.

 Or, perhaps this is a problem specific to a certain processor ?  So
far, I think all the list knows is that you have a problem, and an
old version of lilo.  More data might eventually help to identify
what is causing this.  If you have a fairly old version of lilo,
maybe you also have an old version of gcc ?

 For Bart too, which version(s) of gcc are you using on the systems
where lilo is slow to load, and which cpu(s) do you have there ?

Ken, who relies on lilo for his server, and gets worried by reports
of trouble with it.
-- 
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce