I post this under “Tumbleweed”, but many of the problems were already present when I was using just a “stock” 11.4 (and partially previous versions) install: “preload” really sucks sometimes!
“FIBMAP: Invalid argument” for months floods the console windows. According to different posts, this is a preload-problem, for which a solution is already availble for quite some time. However, not even Tumbleweed seems to include this patch?
And: Every now and then, my computer (quad core, 2,4 Ghz, 4 GB) slows down and gets unresponsive. “top” show no obvious cpu load, however the slugginess definetely corresponds to several “preload” et. al. processess which run for several minutes. Afterwards, everything is good again. I don’t know why this happens, this preload process don’t happen after special updates, only every now and then after a reboot.
This problems persist over several openSUSE installations, several versions, and on different hardware. I also read that preload is considered deprecated because of systemd (?). What’s your opinion - should I get rid of preload, or does it, besides negative side effects, fasten up something?
What are the plans concerning preload? Is it generally on its “way out” for future openSUSE releases? And, as I hear this for the first time: Is it really a KDE thing?!
> What are the plans concerning preload? Is it generally on its “way
> out” for future openSUSE releases? And, as I hear this for the first
> time: Is it really a KDE thing?!
This FIBMAP Problem comes too in runlevel 3 and so would say it is not
a KDE problem. I uninstall it too without any disadvantages.
I get may lines of “FIBMAP: invalid argument” in my console; until now i did not notice the cause…
What role “preload” has ? It`s just for KDE or for the entire OS?
I have Tumbleweed and KDE 4.6 and i was thinking to uninstall it too after reading some of the posts.
I’ve done some reading meanwhile: it’s indeed preload causing this, and a system can do without it. Best is to uninstall preload and the preload-kmp-YOUR_KERNEL_FLAVOR
I would say said it’s a myth that KDE needs preload and Gnome does not. It is a systemwide preload/caching service that runs with or without any desktop environment. So we should probably stop discussing this problem in relation to KDE.
However, I was wondering, because every official statement on preload as of now still states drastically improved boot and startup times (40% better and so on), while in real life I only can remember problems with it in several different setups, and many posts in forums seem to mirror that experience. Moreover, as seen with the “FIBMAP”-problem (which renders the console unusable for times), openSUSE seems no longer to be very interested in updating the preload packages with long available fixes, so I get the idea that preload might sooner or later be deprecated.
Is there an official openSUSE “policy” on preload? As I mentioned before, I remember reading something like that somewhere in connection with the switch to systemd.
I have this problem too. In my system installed this packages - preload and preload-kmp-desktop. I need uninstall both packages?
Sorry, my English is very bad
Or one could just try uninstalling preload-kmp-desktop. I’m running Tumbleweed with latest kernel-desktop and preload installed, but notice that preload-kmp-desktop is not installed (by default?). BTW, I haven’t seen any evidence of this problem here.
For me as Tumbleweed user, when i boot up, the bootloader lets me choose between Systemd and SysV; i still use SysV, but since preload was uninstall is it okay to try systemd ?
I made an interesting observation after disabling preload: For months now, I had a strange screen corruption - half the kdm-login screen would suddenly became completely distorted all the time (sometimes sooner, sometimes later, e.g. only after login, but nevertheless always, and always the same distortion pattern). This was both with closed- and open-sourced ATI driver, so not a driver isssue.
As the distortion would go away after the screen content changed once, I did not dig further in it. Thinking about it, this problem seems to have occured at about the same time the “FIBMAP” messages started. However, now with preload gone the distortion is also gone!!!
Given the fact that I e.g. also ran into problems when, after updating system stuff, preload mixed in some old versions of code (especially with the closed-source ATI driver), which was very different to diagnose, I think that there are pretty many reasons for not enabling preload. Speedwise I noticed no effect at all.
I experienced the “hogged CPU phenomenon” with preload, too.
So I started to do some testing. I have a multiboot system. A Maintenance partition and a production partition both with 11.4 installed and Tumbleweed enabled. Both installs are identical.
I had preload installed on the maintenance partition only to compare the behaviour with and wihtout it. It seems, that there are two programs involved when running preload: A program called “waitforidle” which - as the name implies - calls another program, called “stop_preload” after the system has been in idle for a certain time. My observations were:
After the system has booted it is required that the system is in idle for 2 - 3 Minutes before stop_preload is executed
If you have programs in autostart or start applications yourself within these 2 - 3 minutes, these actions are notified by preload and saved in a file, so that preload will actually “preload” these applications on the next boot to make them load faster
This seems to be the cause for an unresponsive system
If you do nothing after a boot until stop_preload has been executed, the system will boot a little faster the next time you start it. But if you do not want to wait until stop-preload has finished, No. 2 and 3 above apply.
Since I do not want to wait after boot to work with my system and I boot my machine at most once or twice a day anyway, I uninstalled preload on my maintenance partition, too. IMO there is more hassle and unconvenient system behaviour with preload installed.