[vox-tech] Extremely slow bootup

[Chanoch (Ken) Bloom]

My laptop is running Debian's 2.6.38-2-amd64 kernel, and when booting it
today, I discovered it was extremely slow to boot up (like 5 to 10
minutes). There's no particular obvious culprit -- it just seems each of
the initscripts takes longer. When debugging I tried to debug this, I
noticed that programs are also slow to load. The system is also very
slow to shut down. Again, there's no particular obvious culprit -- it
just seems each of the initscripts takes longer.

Using kernel 2.6.38-1-amd64 is much speedier (within a couple of
minutes). I think kernel 2.6.38-1-amd64 has an older init ramdisk,
becuase I don't see the same udev errors between the two kernels.

Any ideas how to debug this? My thought was that there might be a
problem with DMA, but "hdparm -d /dev/sda" complains that the IOCTL
isn't supported. I also don't see any suggestive differences between the
dmesg dumps between the kernels.

One possibly relevant kernel difference is that 2.6.38-2-amd64 has
CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE=y
# CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_ALWAYS is not set
CONFIG_TRANSPARENT_HUGEPAGE_MADVISE=y

It also has
CONFIG_BOOT_PRINTK_DELAY=y

2.6.38-1-amd64 doesn't have any of these.
My desktop computer is using 2.6.38-2-amd64 without problems.

--Ken