Hello all,
Some of you may recall a 30 second delay for xen_fb_frontend when
booting Debian in EC2[1]. It appears that this is now starting to
resolve - if you launch (or stop/start) an instance and get a newer BIOS
from the hypervisor. Today I took a running instance and used dmidecode
to look at the BIOS, and saw:
# dmidecode 2.12
SMBIOS 2.4 present.
11 structures occupying 310 bytes.
Table at 0x000EB01F.
Handle 0x0000, DMI type 0, 24 bytes
BIOS Information
Vendor: Xen
Version: 4.2.amazon
Release Date: 12/07/2015
They key information here is the Release Date. After an instance stop,
wait a second, and start (hence, not a reboot) this instance came up
with dmidecode showing:
BIOS Information
Vendor: Xen
Version: 4.2.amazon
Release Date: 08/09/2016
This boot also shows that it was available in a minute:
# systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 7.343s (kernel) + 54.788s (userspace) = 1min 2.132s
Looking at the dmesg shows that xen_fb_frontend did not pause for 30
seconds.
I ran this stop+pause+start (again, not a reboot/restart) in us-east-1.
New instances I have launched in US-East-1 appear to also have this
newer bios. It may not be uniformly available worldwide at this time
(appears this update has not yet hit eu-west-1), but it may be worth
trying this if this particularly affects you. No changes were required
on the running instance for this.
James
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2014/09/msg00305.html
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