I’ve pretty much managed to set everything up to my liking on both my desktop and the laptop. A few issues remain though.
My desktop pc is extremely slow when it comes to GUI. After grub, the initial screen with the cameleon is supposed to fade in fast and then seamlessly display the login box. However, it takes like 30 seconds for the image to fade in, I can count the individual fades as the image get brighter, its that slow. Then when the login box is supposed to display, the screen goes black and comes back with the login box. After that, everything seems fine.
I tried removing the themed login but that doesn’t remove this fade effect.
My box is running 13.1 fully updated with Nvidia drivers from the repositories (331.60 I believe). But I don’t think the driver is active at that point, I tihnk that’s why the screen goes blank to display the login screen.
Is this lower res screen coming from grub perhaps?
The picture is NOT supposed to fade in fast.
It’s purpose is to fade in slowly until the system has booted up completely to show the boot progress.
Then when the login box is supposed to display, the screen goes black and comes back with the login box. After that, everything seems fine.
I tried removing the themed login but that doesn’t remove this fade effect.
My box is running 13.1 fully updated with Nvidia drivers from the repositories (331.60 I believe). But I don’t think the driver is active at that point, I tihnk that’s why the screen goes blank to display the login screen.
No, that’s a limitation of kdm, the login screen. And yes, the driver is active at that point.
I think GNOME’s gdm does it better so you might want to try that if that disturbs you.
(Install the package “gdm”, and set DISPLAYMANGER=“gdm” in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager)
You could also try lightdm as well.
Is this lower res screen coming from grub perhaps?
Yes, you can set the grub2/bootsplash resolution in YaST->Boot Loader->Boot Loader Options. (“Use Graphical Console”)
The default “Autodetected by Grub2” does not work well with all cards, so explicitely set a resolution there.
Oh, oke. I assumed that because on the laptop the entire boot process takes less than 7 seconds. I barely see the fade because its followed up by the login screen so quickly.
I don’t think that is really the issue here so I’ll leave it as it is. I need to troubleshoot why its loading so slow which is before the login is displayed. The HD led is continuously burning during the fade phase.
I’ll have a look but I doubt it will change anything.
Boot from Grub menu (after POST) takes 50 seconds to the login screen. I’m booting in EFI mode.
The system is an Asus P8P67 with 2600k I7 (running stock, not overclocked) with 16GB 1600Mhz memory (running on SPD settings). Disk is a Samsung 830 256GB on SATA6 (port 0).
The laptop is also Asus, N55SF with mobile i7 version (forget which one exactly) with Kingston 128GB SSD (the cheaper one). Boots in less than 7 seconds.
It seems to just be slow with everything, but LSB (configuring network or something?) took some noticable time but its not the main cause, it just takes a few seconds.
I uploaded a bootchart if anyone wants to have a look.
>
> I’ve pretty much managed to set everything up to my liking on both my
> desktop and the laptop. A few issues remain though.
>
> My desktop pc is extremely slow when it comes to GUI. After grub, the
> initial screen with the cameleon is supposed to fade in fast and then
> seamlessly display the login box. However, it takes like 30 seconds
> for the image to fade in, I can count the individual fades as the
> image get brighter, its -that- slow. Then when the login box is
> supposed to display, the screen goes black and comes back with the
> login box. After that, everything seems fine.
>
> I tried removing the themed login but that doesn’t remove this fade
> effect.
>
> My box is running 13.1 fully updated with Nvidia drivers from the
> repositories (331.60 I believe). But I don’t think the driver is
> active at that point, I tihnk that’s why the screen goes blank to
> display the login screen.
>
> Is this lower res screen coming from grub perhaps?
>
> Any ideas how I can solve this?
>
You could try replacing nVidia driver with nouveau though that might
cause other trouble - my machine would lock up occasionally with the
nouveau driver. I got problems with that boot display after replacing
nouveau with nVidia on 13.1. The screen comes in fairly bright, then
fades rapidly to black and then slowly brightens again. I recognise the
problem from way back and I think nVidia have picked up an old version
of the display.
–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 13.2-m0 (64-bit); KDE 4.12.2; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Kernel: 3.14.0-rc5; Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
Well, in that bootchart, the vmware kernel modules got recompiled which of course takes time.
Btw, you can also use “systemd-analyze blame” to see a list of which service takes how long to start on boot.
And “systemd-analyze critical-chain” shows the longest chain that makes up the boot time.
I’m running Vmware Workstation, one of the first things I installed so I’m not sure how it booted before. But 22 secs on network.service is a lot isn’t it?
systemd-analyze critical-chain
The time after the unit is active or started is printed after the “@” character.
The time the unit takes to start is printed after the “+” character.
Disabling from within Vmware settings doesn’t help. I need to check with those systemd commands later today but last night I did a quick reboot and the time is still ~50 seconds.
I’ll see if I can figure out how to switch, not sure how that works but it can’t be that hard;).
Nice! Thanks Wolfi323, that took 25 seconds off the boot time, down to ~25-30 seconds now.
While we’re at it, something I’ve noticed not happening on other systems is that the initial loading of the RAM disk takes 15 seconds on my machine. On other systems this happens almost instantly.
Is that something you think we can tackle as well? That would be grand rotfl!
This is not specific with SuSe though, its happening with every distro I’ve had.
You can of course try to reduce the size of the initrd to make it load faster.
One of the biggest part is plymouth (the boot splash system) and its dependencies, so if you uninstall that (and recreate the initrd with “mkinitrd” if necessary) it should be much smaller. You’ll also loose the boot animation then completely of course and the system will boot in text mode.
I don’t think the size is the problem, for some reason its really slow reading or processing it. Or there’s something in there (module?) that it gets stuck on for 10 seconds. The file is less than 40 meg so it should read it in 1/10th of a second. The laptop does it in less than a few seconds.
BIOS is the latest. Or its my SSD/Mobo combo, I don’t know I’m out on a limb here.
Yes, and that’s a BIOS issue probably, as I wrote.
But if it was smaller, it would be loaded faster.
Or there’s something in there (module?) that it gets stuck on for 10 seconds.
No. The initrd is just loaded as a whole, as it is. There are no modules being started or similar at that point.
The file is less than 40 meg so it should read it in 1/10th of a second. The laptop does it in less than a few seconds.
At that time there are no drivers loaded yet, so BIOS calls are used. And those seem to be slow on that system.
Not much you can do I’m afraid (at least I wouldn’t know what you could try).
Last night I installed Arch from scratch, wiped the disk. Installed Gummiboot, full KDE environment, KDM and Nvidia drivers, it boots to the login screen in less than 10 seconds.
Like I said, its not a SuSe specific thing, all Debian-based distro’s I had loaded slow, Fedora too. Still would be nice to know why or what it is.
Well, it’s the boot loader that loads the initrd, so maybe grub2 has a problem on that particular system (I suppose the other distros you tried/mentioned use grub2 as well).
You could try a different one. That’s quite easy in openSUSE, just change it in YaST->System->Boot Loader.
Or as Gummiboot does not expose that problem apparently, use that. But I have no idea how to set that up to boot openSUSE.
Hm, never realized grub could be causing such a thing but I suppose its worth a try.
Gummiboot looks simple enough, its easy as pie to add another menu option from what I gather. I’ll play around tonight. I backed up SuSe before I wiped so its going to be interesting to see if I can restore that to a working system. I reserved a root partition for SuSe to be able to dual boot.
Thanks again for the great help guys! Much appreciated!
I was able to boot SuSe with Gummiboot. Although /home was missing it booted much faster. Basically, the initrd phase is done in a few seconds. LSB still takes some time so its not blazingly fast, I think it took another 10 seconds off the old boot times.
Not sure what grub does there … but good thing is I now know what was causing that.
