Booting on battery extremely slow

fsck · 2008-12-08 00:43:03

It's kind of strange, but as soon as Arch starts loading acpi modules, booting becomes very slow if it's not plugged in. The blinking line stops blinking, in fact, but pushing the power button seems to nudge it along. If I plug it in in mid-boot, it continues just like normal. I know the modules load correctly because there aren't any error messages, and cpufreq, the battery meter, and the fan all work properly.

alienman · 2009-02-26 18:06:55

Exactly the same problem here, and this is getting really annnoying because, is very difficult to start my laptop without plugging it to AC.

I've been looking for any help but I though I was alone, this could be a kernel error, or maybe something related to our battery, mine is almos dying, but still could be used for an hour and so.

Hope someone could help us, actually I was thinking to try ubuntu and see if the same problem exist, but I a little bit lazy to backup my info because I have ext4 partitions so I would have to reformat them to ext3.

alienman · 2009-03-06 23:05:38

Well I tested with ubuntu and booting from my battery is also slow, but it seemed that it was some uvdev problems. I'm not quite sure because I just tested the boot and I removed ubuntu from my system and installed Arch.

But a friend has ubuntu and he has not problem booting, so I would like to ask you if you have an old or broken battery like me??. Maybe some of the info that the booting system needs is an incorrect value.

What does people here thinks??

peterw · 2009-03-09 14:38:57

I have exactly the same problem. Of all the distros I have had on my laptop, arch is the only one that does this. I have no idea. Where should I start looking for whats going on? I have never really tried to dive into problems with udev, and hardware stuff like this.

Wintervenom · 2009-03-09 14:41:11

Tried booting in performance mode?

alienman · 2009-03-09 18:21:37

I haven't tested with performance mode enabled (mine is set to ondemand) but I think that wouldn't help at all because I guess the cpufrequtils is not enabled yet.

There are many other things that I have tested and seemed like a problem when using my laptop only with the battery, if someone have same problems maybe they could help me confirm this, so I can expend more time seeking for a solution or reporting a nasty bug.

* The first one is booting damn slow when on battery.
* The second is when using on battery the system is not able to suspend/hibernate because it takes forever to do it (using pm-utils).
* When powering off or rebooting the system, it also takes forever to shut down my computer, it stops when the message POWER OFF is showed and nothing else happens i need to press enter several times to truly powering off.
* And finally I'm not able to resume from suspend/resume because it is like the same problem when booting, it ends resuming pm-utils, but it seems to fail when loading some modules (that's what I guess).
* I forget to mention that when the boot process freezes booting on battery the clock gets stopped, the clokc of the BIOS stops and when I'm able to enter to my GNOME I can see some minutes are wrong. I have checked this several times. I don't know if this is a problem related to the BIOS since I remember that before installing this last arch version I used Windows Vista and I updated the BIOS with an HP tool. Now there is a new BIOS update but I can't get it since I don't want to install Windows just for that.

Any one of these problems gets solved by inmediatley plugin in to AC

I know it's hard to believe a problem like this because there are no many people having it, but at least it seems I'm not alone, so I will spend more time looking for the cause and then try to provide a solution

Last edited by alienman (2009-03-13 18:00:04)

peterw · 2009-03-23 23:01:19

I haven't been able to make any progress on this. Any updates though?

pointone · 2009-03-23 23:14:51

Have you tried the acpi=off kernel boot option?

alienman · 2009-03-24 05:05:17

pointone wrote:

Have you tried the acpi=off kernel boot option?

Thanks I tried your suggestion and it worked, no problems loading linux kernel by meaning that it doesn't freeze when booting when on battery. But now I can't get the cpufrequtils to work, and some other things requiring acpi like suspend to ram, monitos of cpu doesn't work either and I don't know what else. But obviously the problem is only related to acpi, does anybody has a clue how to solve this, or what exactly with acpi is the problem???

kahrn · 2009-03-25 14:44:30

Not sure if this will be of any use, but it may be worth checking out bootchart to figure out what process is taking so much time to finish executing.

alienman · 2009-04-15 22:35:12

Ok I have tried booting with the bootchart and I think it was very helpful. I saw some differences that I want to share with you, unfortunatelly I'm not very experienced with sysinit ann in general with the boot process, I read the wiki and learnt some new things but not sure how to solve it. I hope someone more experienced in this topic could help us.

First let me explain what these charts mean. The first one was taken by booting with the A/C disconnected, I let the process for a while and helped a little bit by pressing enter key if not some steps were frozen. And at the end when trying to load HAL I plugged the A/C again because if not it takes forever.

The second chart was a normal boot.

I saw some process missing in the chart taken while booting on battery like modprobe, udevadm, load-modules.sh, etc. So my question is does anybody has a clue why these steps aren't being loaded when booting on battery??

Last edited by alienman (2009-04-15 22:56:19)

alienman · 2009-05-26 15:23:09

Hi Everybody, after doing some search today about this old problem. I finally found what it seems to be the solution. At least the parameters used for the boot process worked fine for me.

Summarizing what the guys exposed if you have the same problem that me (it seems to be happening on AMD cpu) you should try to boot with

highres=off nohz=off

And they provide a patch, the problem is that I don't know how to apply this patch. I know programming but I have never done a patch for the kernel so any help would be incredible.

I put the link if anyone is interested.
http://bugzilla.kernel.org./show_bug.cgi?id=13233

I hope it helps someone.

alienman · 2009-06-17 16:09:24

Finally this issue was solved in the new kernel 2.26.30-4. I tested this and it is working flawlessly. If anybody is still having this issue try the testing kernel or wait till the new kernel reaches the core repository.

peterw · 2009-08-11 16:58:53

has anyone tried the new kernel from the latest image? I had to move away from arch because I couldn't get this issue resolved. If not I think I will try again with some of the above help.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-08 00:43:03

Booting on battery extremely slow

#2 2009-02-26 18:06:55

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#3 2009-03-06 23:05:38

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#4 2009-03-09 14:38:57

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#5 2009-03-09 14:41:11

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#6 2009-03-09 18:21:37

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#7 2009-03-23 23:01:19

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#8 2009-03-23 23:14:51

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#9 2009-03-24 05:05:17

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#10 2009-03-25 14:44:30

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#11 2009-04-15 22:35:12

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#12 2009-05-26 15:23:09

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#13 2009-06-17 16:09:24

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

#14 2009-08-11 16:58:53

Re: Booting on battery extremely slow

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