[vox-tech] Extremely slow bootup

[Brian Lavender]

On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 11:53:10AM -0500, Chanoch (Ken) Bloom wrote:
> 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,

Did you figure it out? I am also wondering if somehow, your system dropped into
Programmable IO (PIO). That would certainly slow things down. But, I would find
it odd if it suddenly started doing it.

brian
-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture