Arch Linux

mouseman

Member

From: Outta nowhere

Registered: 2014-04-04

Posts: 291

long delay loading grub and initramfs

After a reinstall of Arch with its rootfs on zfs I am now experiencing long delays loading grub and after that, loading linux and initramfs. After that everything seems normal again.

I have tried regenerating the zpool.cache but that doesn't help. There are no messages or errors, its just slow and during the delay, I can hear the harddisks rattling, as if its scanning them or something.

The install is done on 3 nvme ssd's with the first 100G on each ssd in raidz for Arch install. The rest is partitioned, but unused at the moment. It's a BIOS system and MBR partition tables.

I document the steps of my installs and basically replicated earlier installs I've done. The first installs were on 2 nvme ssd's with 170G on each ssd in a mirror. This new installation is done on 3 nvme ssd's in raidz.

There are no messages, no errors, how can I troubleshoot and fix this?

Thanks!

mouseman

Member

From: Outta nowhere

Registered: 2014-04-04

Posts: 291

Re: long delay loading grub and initramfs

To test a few things, I've reinstalled changed bios to UEFI and repartitioned with GPT. Made a sepratate boot and efi partition outside zfs. Grub loads fast but I can't get the system to boot this way (cant find initramfs). I didn't troubleshoot it any further.
I changed it back to mbr and reinstalled with UEFI disabled, but again it is slow loading grub. It takes ~70 seconds for grub to show, then another 20 seconds for linux/initramfs to load. After that the system is up within a few seconds.

I wonder if there's been an update (regression) because previously I never had this problem.