GRUB really slow to boot
Today I rebooted my machine for the first time in quite a while, after
the kernel update that was released along with Debian 11.2.
When it reached the GRUB screen, I pressed Enter, and nothing happened
as far as I could see. I was initially worried that it had stopped
seeing my USB keyboard (a thing that I've experienced with GRUB and
certain USB slots on certain machines in the past). This keyboard
plugged into this same USB slot had worked in previous versions of GRUB
on this machine, though.
The next thing I observed was that after 5 seconds, it still hadn't
booted, nor had the coundown ("will automatically boot in 5s" or whatever)
advanced. It appeared to be hung.
I waited a bit longer, and the 5s changed to 4s. It just took a really
long time (like 15+ seconds for each second on the timer).
Eventually, after a minute or two, the system booted. Everything is
working normally now, post-GRUB.
Has anyone experienced this, or does anyone have ideas about how to
prevent it happening again? I am not interested in trial and error
for this, because it's far too annoying and disruptive. But if there
are well-known ideas about things I could try (e.g. "grub 2.04 is known
to have bugs on Intel motherboards, revert to 2.03") then I'm game.
I Googled it, and the only hits I found were for people reporting slow
interactivity with GRUB on high-resolution displays. I don't think my
monitor is high resolution, and this has NEVER been a problem on ANY
previous boot, with this same computer and monitor. I have not changed
any hardware. Only software versions. (Of course, I can't rule out
hardware going bad.)
Here's the monitor, from xdpyinfo:
screen #0:
dimensions: 1920x1080 pixels (508x285 millimeters)
resolution: 96x96 dots per inch
Here's the other hardware:
unicorn:~$ lspci -nn
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v6/7th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers [8086:591f] (rev 05)
00:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6th-10th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) [8086:1901] (rev 05)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 630 [8086:5912] (rev 04)
00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 200 Series/Z370 Chipset Family USB 3.0 xHCI Controller [8086:a2af]
00:15.0 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation 200 Series PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #0 [8086:a2e0]
00:15.1 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation 200 Series PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #1 [8086:a2e1]
00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation 200 Series PCH CSME HECI #1 [8086:a2ba]
00:17.0 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation 200 Series PCH SATA controller [AHCI mode] [8086:a282]
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 200 Series PCH PCI Express Root Port #5 [8086:a294] (rev f0)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 200 Series PCH PCI Express Root Port #15 [8086:a29e] (rev f0)
00:1e.0 Signal processing controller [1180]: Intel Corporation 200 Series/Z370 Chipset Family Serial IO UART Controller #0 [8086:a2a7]
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation 200 Series PCH LPC Controller (H270) [8086:a2c4]
00:1f.2 Memory controller [0580]: Intel Corporation 200 Series/Z370 Chipset Family Power Management Controller [8086:a2a1]
00:1f.3 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 200 Series PCH HD Audio [8086:a2f0]
00:1f.4 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 200 Series/Z370 Chipset Family SMBus Controller [8086:a2a3]
02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 10)
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 3168NGW [Stone Peak] [8086:24fb] (rev 10)
Here's the GRUB versions:
unicorn:~$ dpkg -l grub\* | grep -v ^un
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-=====================-============-============-=================================================================
ii grub-common 2.04-20 amd64 GRand Unified Bootloader (common files)
ii grub-efi-amd64 2.04-20 amd64 GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (EFI-AMD64 version)
ii grub-efi-amd64-bin 2.04-20 amd64 GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (EFI-AMD64 modules)
ii grub-efi-amd64-signed 1+2.04+20 amd64 GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (amd64 UEFI signed by Debian)
ii grub2-common 2.04-20 amd64 GRand Unified Bootloader (common files for version 2)
The last time I booted, when everything was normal:
reboot system boot 5.10.0-10-amd64 Sat Dec 18 06:17 still running
[...]
reboot system boot 5.10.0-9-amd64 Sat Oct 9 11:38 - 10:14 (69+23:36)
According to /var/log/dpkg.log.5.gz GRUB was updated to version 2.04-20
back in July, so the current version of GRUB was in place for both boots.
Which I guess makes this either an intermittent problem, or a failing
hardware problem, or it's caused by some package whose name doesn't
begin with "grub".
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