MX Linux Forum

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?

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.
?

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: 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.

EDIT: To check the display port name and whether you have SVIDEO port, just run "xrandr | grep SVIDEO" from the command line.

A fine explanation Fehlix!

Indeed!

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

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.