<SOLVED> Boot takes 5 times longer on kernel 4.15

[JSeymour]

Upgraded 18.3 to 19 today, no issues, all went fine. The only "issue" maybe is the slow boot, much slower than before. Beautiful release, thanks Clem!

"Much slower" may be an understatement. Now, admittedly, booting off USB2 and what some may regard as an "antiquated" system (Dell Latitude D530, Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, Intel 530-series SSD), but still:

Linux Mint 18.3 MATE: 1:20
Linux Mint 19.0 MATE: 6:22!

Lots of "drm_atomic_helper_wait_for_dependencies," "drm_atomic_helper_wait_for_flip_done" and other "flip_done timed out" messages during the boot. Then the LM logo, then screen goes dark, cursor in upper-left, that eventually disappears, then... nothing for the longest time. Then the desktop eventually appears.

I first thought it was just plain hung. I only found out by accident it would eventually get there by getting distracted by something else on one attempt.

I believe I'm going to upgrade this Mint 17 install to 18.3, instead.

[JerryF]

Upgraded 18.3 to 19 today, no issues, all went fine. The only "issue" maybe is the slow boot, much slower than before. Beautiful release, thanks Clem!

"Much slower" may be an understatement. Now, admittedly, booting off USB2 and what some may regard as an "antiquated" system (Dell Latitude D530, Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, Intel 530-series SSD), but still:

Linux Mint 18.3 MATE: 1:20
Linux Mint 19.0 MATE: 6:22!

Lots of "drm_atomic_helper_wait_for_dependencies," "drm_atomic_helper_wait_for_flip_done" and other "flip_done timed out" messages during the boot. Then the LM logo, then screen goes dark, cursor in upper-left, that eventually disappears, then... nothing for the longest time. Then the desktop eventually appears.

I first thought it was just plain hung. I only found out by accident it would eventually get there by getting distracted by something else on one attempt.

I believe I'm going to upgrade this Mint 17 install to 18.3, instead.

I had the same message with my Dell Inspiron 1520. It's probably the kernel. When I downgraded to a lower kernel series, the boot time was drastically reduced.

You may need to experiment.

[JSeymour]

Yikes! So I installed 18.3. Then applied all the updates. That was a mistake. That gave it 19.0 boot/login performance.

I may have to find a different distro This is not acceptable behaviour.

ETA: That wouldn't have mattered. This problem exists due to a regression bug introduced into the kernel, somewhere between 4.10 and 4.15, that, AIUI, was a work-around for an Intel driver bug. If you search on terms like "drm_atomic_helper_wait_for_dependencies" and "drm_atomic_helper_wait_for_flip_done" you can find it.

Solution was to edit /etc/default/grub and add a parameter:

Code: Select all

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=SVIDEO-1:d"

then

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

and reboot.

ETA2: The above, btw, changed my 6-minute boots and 2-minute logins to 15 and 10 seconds, respectively. Shutdown now takes about eight seconds to power-down.