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Boot times,. Why are mine so slooooow?

Discussion in 'General Linux Discussion' started by Daniel~, Jul 8, 2019.

  1. Daniel~

    Daniel~ Chief BBS Administrator Staff Member

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    I haven't timed mine but I will. But for now I can tell you that once I reach the Mint logo with the progressive green dots it takes six and a half repetitions to reach desk top.

    This after considerable time spent in darkness waiting for the boot screen, then more time spent in darkness waiting for the logo then more time in darkness waiting for desk top.

    I can remember 10 second boots of yesteryear!

    I do realize that most often I'm only awakening my box from suspend and that takes about 3 seconds.
    But have we as a people completely given up our right to a fast boot?

    How many Dot sequences does it taker Your logo to compete it's self?

    If you get perfectly fine boot times and can offer suggestions to improve mine I would account you a friend!
    If I already account you my friend, then please strart rebooting and let me know just where I stand in the boot world. ":O}
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2019
  2. Kaitain

    Kaitain Active Member

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    But... but... but... current Mint uses systemd, and systemd's the fastest thing out there, designed for speed and... and... and... never mind.

    Actually, that borg cube's grown a bit big, and lost its focus on boot times. Oddly, I don't think its fans have noticed yet.

    One other thing, if you're running kernel 4.19 or newer, your distro may have elected not to trust the CPU's hardware random number generator, and so is waiting for enough entropy to initialise its software random number generator before allowing boot to proceed. That can take a fair few seconds. If you want to override this behaviour, add random.trust_cpu=1 to your kernel command line.

    Also, as you're trying to use 4K, X modesetting is almost certainly a problem...
  3. Daniel~

    Daniel~ Chief BBS Administrator Staff Member

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    I am using 4096X2160 with no problems except only 430 drivers will allow this. everything else limits my rez to 1920X1080.

    Please show me as you would a little child how to emplament
    random.trust_cpu=1

    Ridiculous how hard it is to get a truly random number.!
  4. Kaitain

    Kaitain Active Member

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    Can you give the output of

    cat /proc/cmdline
  5. Daniel~

    Daniel~ Chief BBS Administrator Staff Member

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    Sure, thanks for taking an interest! Screenshot from 2019-07-09 10-40-58.png Screenshot from 2019-07-09 10-40-58.png
  6. Kaitain

    Kaitain Active Member

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    OK, when you next reboot, there's a brief pause between POST completing and booting actually starting when the Grub screen momentarily flashes up.

    In that period, you can hit the letter "e", which will allow you to edit the command line used to boot the kernel.

    Scroll down (arrow keys) until you find the line that says /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-54-generic (etc). After "ro" and before "quiet splash" type random.trust_cpu=on

    Then hit F10 to continue booting. If this is measurably faster, then we'll look at how to make this change permanently. If not, then there's no point.
  7. Daniel~

    Daniel~ Chief BBS Administrator Staff Member

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    OK. I start hitting "E" as soon as my keyboard lights up for use. I hit it before my boot screen showed, after my boot screen showed and in every blank space.

    It was humiliating! ":O}

    It ignored my key presses as if I were a Windows user
    to be shunned and cast aside;

    Perhaps you have another letter? ":O}

    My grub screen does not usually flash, but then at times it does...I don't know why.

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