Slow Boot for Helena / Moblin on Toshiba NB205

[sritzau]

Hello,

I have a Toshiba NB205 onto which I have installed XP, Linux Mint 8 (Helena) , and Moblin 2.1. Things are basically working, but the boot times for Linux Mint 8 and Moblin 2.1 are very very long (>1 but minute). What appears to be happening is that there is a pause or timeout during boot where the disk is being accessed only every so often and the computer acts like it is scanning something. The boot time from the Live SD card I made - particularly for Moblin - did not take as long to boot.

I have gone into grub and turned off the quiet splash for LM8 to see if I can figure out what the hold-up is, but it looks like the pause is after the first splash screen. There is a slight delay at the end of the fist splash screen as things like "init-bottom" go by then I get an otherwise blank screen with a cursor in the upper left hand corner. If I had to guess, I would say that this seems to me to be where there is an unnecessarily long pause.

I know there must be a file somewhere that captures all of this activity, but I am fairly new to Linux so I don't know where to find it or exactly how to interpret it. I am taking the fact that both LM8 and Moblin experience a pause that it may have to do with my hardware on the nb205 and its interaction with Linux - but I could be completely off-base about that.

Thanks in advance,

Steve

[pompom]

Hi,

Welcome to Linux Mint! To see the errors (if any) during boot, 'dmesg | less'. For tweaking the boot time 'sudo apt-get install bootchart'.

Cheers,

pompom

[sritzau]

Thank you so much for the tip - I did not know bootchart existed, and it looks like exactly what I need to make the determination of what is going on.

I have attached two profiles. The first image is a the bootchart output for a typical boot where I "poke at" the computer during boot-up. The second image is one where I leave it sitting for a while. I haven't done any analysis on my own yet because I am working on the NB205 I am trying to tweak, and analyzing those images on a 10" screen is not pleasant.

Steve

nb205-helena-20091227-1.png

nb205-helena-20091225-1.png

[distro hopper]

I would like to know if you determine why boot times are slower. With Mint 7 Gloria, I had amazing boot times of 20-25sec. Now I'm up to between 55sec and just over 1 minute.

[sritzau]

I confess I haven't gone through the bootchart with a fine tooth comb and determined every aspect of my bootup, but on a related search I discovered that others with this computer experienced slow boot times and attributed it to setting the hard drive mode to AHCI (the Toshiba default) instead of compatibility mode in the BIOS. I went ahead and switched from AHCI to compatability mode and I saw a decrease in boot time in both Mint and Moblin. Windows XP had to adjust to the fact that I changed modes - it saw the hard drive as new hardware - but it seemed to take it stride and is now running along fine. Really what seems to have changed is a long pause in the middle of the boot process that I could at least partially affect by messing with the computer during boot.

nb205-helena-20100103-1.png