Extended Boot Time

[B-Still]

Does anyone have a workaround for Linux Mint's boot lag?

What I call "boot lag" is a reference to the 3 to 10 seconds of black screen (depending on the system) between the BIOS handoff to GRUB.

My first experience with Mint was with version 11, and I noticed it then. All the versions of Mint I've tried thus far, 12, 13 and 14 on both AMD and Intel based machines in both 32 and 64 bit flavors also have this "boot lag". In my Linux experience Mint is the only distribution I've seen this behavior in, ALL other Linux distros that I've installed go from the BIOS to GRUB immediately. My customers enjoy Mint so they get used to the lag or in most cases don't even know about it. A few do come and ask me to fix this, but I have found no real info on this so I thought I would post the question here.

What is it about Mint that makes the system appear to lag after the BIOS screen?

Thanks for any help on this!

[B-Still]

All these Linux/Mint brainiacs and no one can accurately answer this?

[DrHu]

OK, one item that causes a delay is a splash screen, whether it is hidden (quiet in the grub.cfg file or not)
--the second way to determine the issue if it is a big problem, is to run bootchart and determine the areas of the boot sequence that is causing a longer delay than you beleive is necessary..
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/bootchart.html

[B-Still]

Hello DrHu, and thanks for the reply.

I installed and executed bootchart, wow nice software!

However at the point of being able to append bootchart to the boot process the 7.5 seconds (Timed on a AMD 890X chipset/AMD Phenom II x6 CPU, 1TB WD Black HDD rig) of black screen has passed.

Is there somewhere else to look and see if it's trying to load something, maybe a Mint theme of sorts and failing then defaulting to the Debian black background with white text?

Thanks!