Booting from USB pen drive is *UNGODLY* slow

Gullible Jones · 2006-04-23 00:53:01

Being quite sick of floppies, I decided to install Minimax on my USB pen drive, and it worked fine... But things are going very badly with the boot process. You see, GRUB takes 10 seconds to load, the kernel takes over a minute, and the initrd isn't done loading after 5 full minutes... This initrd is 32 MB, and Damn Small Linux, which is 50 MB, can be copied entirely to my machine's RAM in less than 30 seconds. This absurdly low speed makes booting via USB quite unfeasable.

Now I've got the EHCI controller enabled in my BIOS; in fact, what makes this doubly annoying is that USB2 works fine when I'm booted into Arch Linux, with huge files (e.g. Minimax's initrd) getting written in a matter of seconds. Yet it seems that the EHCI controller isn't doing its thing while I'm booting. What's going on here? I'd really like to get my machine up and running again, the sooner the better...

(For what it's worth, my mobo is a Biostar M7VIG 400, if that's any help...)

iphitus · 2006-04-23 01:16:08

not much you can really do, if you bios doesnt support accessing it as a USB2.0 device at boot time, then you cant really do much to speed it up.

You could try using a initramfs kernel, stripped down to the module you need as initramfs is substantially smaller. Mine is only 2mb right now, and I could shrink it further if I wished.

James

Gullible Jones · 2006-04-23 02:11:34

Can't do that, Minimax puts the whole damn thing in the initrd.

You sure there's nothing I can do about this? No BIOS update that would fix it, or anything? :cry:

iphitus · 2006-04-23 06:36:09

Gullible Jones wrote:

Can't do that, Minimax puts the whole damn thing in the initrd.
You sure there's nothing I can do about this? No BIOS update that would fix it, or anything? :cry:

You're saying minimax puts the whole system into the initrd? That is so.. crap. Unlike IDE there's like a max 3 or 4 different usb1.1 controllers out there, and I've only seen about 2 usb2.0 controllers out there, so it's soo much more feasible to have it boot up and mount the usb drive.

I mean, that's just lazy compared to most liveCDs which boot and have to load thirty something IDE modules, SCSI modules, USB modules, Firewire modules and now SATA modules to find the CD/DVD drive, whereas the usb only needs uhci-hcd, ohci-hcd, ehci-hcd and usb-storage to cover 95% of usb capable computers out there.

Make you own usb distro based on Arch is the only thing I can suggest. Possibly base it off the Archie scripts.

As for your bios, there might be an update, but thats something you can check, not for everyone to do for you.

Gullible Jones · 2006-04-23 16:22:37

Thanks... Can't use the Arch install CD though, if you use that with a USB stick you won't be able to load any modules for some reason. I'll check out the BIOS update, but that's confused by the fact that Powerspec claims I have a M7VIG 400 Pro mobo, which AFAIK is identical to an ordinary M7VIG 400, and Biostar-USA says that the M7VIG 400 Pro doesn't exist, despite having a BIOS upgrade available specifically for that mobo.

Also, something here isn't quite making sense... At the lowest bandwith used, 1.5 Mbit/s, it should take about 3 minutes to load the the 32 megabyte initrd... But it actually takes almost 30 minutes, indicating that I'm getting just over a tenth the least bandwidth that ought to be available. Ergo, there is something very strange going on...

iphitus · 2006-04-24 12:39:12

that is wierd

Gullible Jones · 2006-04-24 20:10:21

Yeah no shit... So is the stuff I'm getting from my 128 MB ram stick, which has pretty persuaded me that I will avoid MEI at all costs in the future.

(Let's see... 8 MB of RAM disappearing, then the BIOS registering an extra 8 MB, numbers not adding up all over the place, and another 16 MB of RAM disappearing at one point, although that came back... The sooner I get rid of it the better.)

Edit: I did try one other thing, turning off "Plug-and-play OS" - I thought that perhaps the BIOS was neglecting to do some important config stuff - but that didn't work either.

cactus · 2006-04-24 20:16:13

sounds like your mobo is possessed...

jaboua · 2006-04-24 22:01:42

Maybe you can try compiling your own (tiny) kernel and put on the memory stick?

Gullible Jones · 2006-04-24 22:22:12

cactus wrote:

sounds like your mobo is possessed...

ROFL... Great way to put it man. I hope not, replacing the thing would be a damn pain in the arse...

Re compiling my own kernel... I think the Arch stock kernel + initrd would work fine, the only problem is that, as I mentioned before, the Arch install stuff goes a little bonkers on a USB stick for unknown reasons.

rayjgu3 · 2006-04-24 22:43:34

maybe this will help
i had an ecs k7s5a <i miss that old board i put it through hell<
every few months i had to clear the cmos
cause it behaved strangely 1st indication was time change
one time it registered 1200 something for the year but the time was right
i did some research found out the cmos would go corrupt on the board from time to time
just move the jumper over replace set time/date
then i used cmossaver to restore settings
i dont recall where i got it from but a google search will pull up plenty

Arch Linux

#1 2006-04-23 00:53:01