Re: 2.6.25 slow boot/reboot

Glauber Costa
2008-04-28T14:26:22Z

Sergio Luis wrote:
> Ken Moffat wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>
> I tried bisecting and after some hours I got
> 9713277607f9eac7d655c6854dd92bc2ce1b6f02 as first bad commit
>
> commit 9713277607f9eac7d655c6854dd92bc2ce1b6f02
> Author: Glauber de Oliveira Costa <gcosta@redhat.com>
> Date: Wed Mar 19 14:25:43 2008 -0300
>
> x86: boot cpus from cpu_up, instead of prepare_cpus
>
> After all the infrastructure work, we're now prepared
> to boot the cpus from cpu_up, and not from prepare_cpus.
> So the difference between cold boot and hotplug is effectively
> over, and the functions are used to the purposes they're meant to.
>
> Signed-off-by: Glauber Costa <gcosta@redhat.com>
> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
>
> (cc'ing Glauber and Ingo, maybe they can help)
>
>> 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 ?
>
> lilo version is 22.8
> gcc version is 4.1.2
> the processor is an amd turion 64x2 2.0 ghz (tl-60) and I am building a 32bit kernel.
> please, let me know if more info is needed.
>
>> 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.
>
> note lilo is indeed much slower than grub to start booting the kernel here, but I am
> talking about this 2.6.25 kernel taking almost 5 min to finish the boot process (once it is
> actually started by the bootloader) when it would take less than 1 minute with 2.6.24.5 in
> this same machine.
>
> thanks,
Can you give me more information on that?
your .config and cpuinfo would be a great start.

I'm specially interested in things involving APIC.