Re: 2.6.25 slow boot/reboot

Sergio Luis
2008-04-28T01:24:17Z

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,

-sergio