Five minute boot? WTF !

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colin_b
Posts: 452
Joined: Sun Mar 19, 2017 7:21 pm

Five minute boot? WTF !

#1 Post by colin_b »

I've just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QI4XysGFys where MX is being installed onto an old laptop.

It's to be expected that boot times won't set any speed records, but it is excruciatingly slow. At ~17:30 an error during boot is displayed and mentioned. Any ideas as to whether the problem lies with the laptop, or is it MX?

Edit: As a footnote, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg5_qtiJVU8 shows how the MX snapshot used on the above laptop was created. Some files were manually altered. Could this cause problems?
Last edited by colin_b on Sat Sep 22, 2018 11:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Richard
Posts: 1577
Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2008 10:31 am

Re: Five minute boot? WTF !

#2 Post by Richard »

It's an old laptop.
Since he gives no specs that I heard or saw, could be many things.

Probably has USB 1 sockets which are very slow.
Harddisk is old.
Memory is old.
MoBo and CPU are old.
?
Thinkpad T430 & Dell Latitude E7450, both with MX-21.3.1
kernal 5.10.0-26-amd64 x86_64; Xfce-4.18.0; 8 GB RAM
Intel Core i5-3380M, Graphics, Audio, Video; & SSDs.

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fehlix
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Re: Five minute boot? WTF !

#3 Post by fehlix »

Well, it appears to me the laptop presented within that video struggled with an old rarely seen and probably still not yet fixed drm_kms_helper-flip_done -timed-out error of the kernel.
The reason is that some kms-kernel routines, struggle with identifying those old SVIDEO ports available in older laptop,
and do make boot and shutdown fairly slow. I have seen it in a couple of Acer's, which I fixed for my family members, as shown below..

If anybody does see such slow boots and / or error messages with an old laptop having an SVIDEO port you need to instruct
the kernel to ignore the SVIDEO.
This can be done by adding as kernel boot option a video kernel parameter like this:

Code: Select all

video=SVIDEO-1:d
You would add this an the MX17-boot screen in the box where you see
"quiet"
so it becomes
"quiet video=SVIDEO-1:d"
or if booting from Grub-menu,
by adding "video=SVIDEO-1:d" at the end of the line starting with linux.

For a permanent fix within an installed MX Linux add the "video=SVIDEO-1:d" to the parameter
within /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="video=SVIDEO-1:d"
and recreate the grub boot menu.
Do the above either with an editor as root or use grub-customizer.
:puppy:
EDIT: To check the display port name and whether you have SVIDEO port, just run "xrandr | grep SVIDEO" from the command line.
Gigabyte Z77M-D3H, Intel Xeon E3-1240 V2 (Quad core), 32GB RAM,
GeForce GTX 770, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB, Seagate Barracuda 4TB

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colin_b
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Re: Five minute boot? WTF !

#4 Post by colin_b »

A fine explanation Fehlix!

:number1:

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Richard
Posts: 1577
Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2008 10:31 am

Re: Five minute boot? WTF !

#5 Post by Richard »

Indeed!
Thinkpad T430 & Dell Latitude E7450, both with MX-21.3.1
kernal 5.10.0-26-amd64 x86_64; Xfce-4.18.0; 8 GB RAM
Intel Core i5-3380M, Graphics, Audio, Video; & SSDs.

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chrispop99
Global Moderator
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Joined: Tue Jan 27, 2009 3:07 pm

Re: Five minute boot? WTF !

#6 Post by chrispop99 »

I've found some older laptops boot very slowly with current kernels regardless of distro.

Swapping to the Debian 4.9 kernel from our PI transformed boot/shutdown times.

Chris
MX Facebook Group Administrator.
Home-built desktop - Core i5 9400, 970 EVO Plus, 8GB
DELL XPS 15
Lots of test machines

alexjack
Posts: 129
Joined: Wed May 02, 2018 3:11 pm

Re: Five minute boot? WTF !

#7 Post by alexjack »

This fix really helped reduce boot time on an older laptop that I'm running (Dell Vostro, Core2 duo). I was getting a number of these error messages, all variants of "...drm_kms_helper...flip_done timed out".

I also was getting one: "drm:intel_cpu_fifo_underrun_irq_handler [i915] *ERROR* CPU pipe B FIFO underrun"

This also seems to have gone away.

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