Arch Linux

onguarde

Member

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 144

Grub Random Lag During Bootime

Peace!

I'm experiencing random "lags" of 5 sec or more at each step of the grub loading boot process. The weird thing is this happens seemingly at random. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't and boot goes fast.

/boot/grub/menu.lst

timeout   1
default   0
color light-blue/black light-cyan/blue

title  kernel2a6
root   (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/hda2 resume=/dev/disk/by-label/hda1 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

title  kernel26-fallback
root   (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-label/hda2 ro earlymodules=piix
initrd /boot/kernel26-fallback.img

My hardisk is an 80Gb Maxtor and hda2 is on reiserfs. I have already tried reinstalling grub to MBR to no avail. I don't think it's anything to do with hibernate either because it happens even when I'm not hibernating at random.

This problem has been bugging me ever since I installed arch a year back... Really spoils the super fast arch boot timing. This together with that sluggish reiserfs fsck. I've been meaning to switch to xfs though.

Thanks in advance!

Last edited by onguarde (2009-03-29 16:14:15)

onguarde

Member

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 144

Re: Grub Random Lag During Bootime

Hmmm.. I guess I'll try to install LILO to fix this. Maybe my hardrive is going boom.

Wilco

Member

Registered: 2008-11-09

Posts: 440

Re: Grub Random Lag During Bootime

Reiserfs sucks these days (for speed). If you want a fast and stable filesystem I recommend ext3 with "-O dir_index" to get extremely fast directory listings. Add "noatime" to fstab and set the maximum filecheck count to 0.

That way you get a filesystem that is lightning fast, stable and never has to be checked.

onguarde

Member

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 144

Re: Grub Random Lag During Bootime

Personally, an important criteria of a good filesystem is fsck times. Reiserfs takes too long to mount and fsck after a crash. XFS is pretty fast in this regards and its performance is "recommended" by the sites below.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388
http://linuxgazette.net/122/TWDT.html#piszcz

Imho. Not very experienced in this regard..

Wilco

Member

Registered: 2008-11-09

Posts: 440

Re: Grub Random Lag During Bootime

If you don't want to disable fsck checks completely it's good to know ext3 is a lot faster compared to reiserfs. With reiser, I have some bad nightmares of rebuilding a B-tree filesystem while ext3 checks and repairs in a few seconds after a system crash (most of the time).

onguarde

Member

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 144

Re: Grub Random Lag During Bootime

Firstly, I decided against installing LILO. The thought of needing to run LILO after every kernel upgrade is too cumbersome. Also heard of grave consequences if u forgot.

I've been doing a bit of research and there were some accounts of slow reiserfs mount times with GRUB. As suggested below, I separated grub files into a 50mb /boot partition. The space is taken from what used to be the swap partition. All seems well now.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions … ow-427442/

Remember to reinstall grub and point it to the new /boot partition. (See GRUB Wiki)

Also, in the course of this, I clarified that the /boot partition does not have to be a primary partition nor is the "bootable" flag(during partition) required.

Yay to fast boot times! I think I'm clocking around 10 sec bios stuff, 20sec to X. Maybe another 10 to KDE4.

Hibernate will take around 30 sec.

Last edited by onguarde (2009-04-10 04:04:49)