Re: GRUB really slow to boot
On Sat 18 Dec 2021 at 11:08:37 (-0500), Greg Wooledge wrote:
> 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.
Mine's a new installation. I've run buster from an external drive
for a while, but have recently installed bullseye on its SSD.
> 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.
Mine's a laptop: HP Spectre x360 Convertable 15-bl012dx.
> 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.
Snap. It's happened maybe three or four times (one gets no record,
of course.)
> 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).
I'm afraid I just assumed it was permanently hung when Enter did
nothing, so I just force-powered off and started over.
> 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 haven't really looked. (I've been sort of off the grid over Christmas.)
> 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.)
This laptop does have a very high resolution: 3840x2160, which
means using a magnifying glass. I started by typing
setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Lat15-TerminusBold32x16.psf.gz
blind, then sticking Xscale="0.5" Yscale="0.5" in .xsession,
but lastly, after editing the Grub screen to add video=960x540
and finding that that fixed everything, I just added
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="video=960x540"
to /etc/default/grub, and removed the scaling.
When it first stalled, I had just installed bullseye, and I only
had /boot/efi/EFI/debian, so I booted the installer's rescue,
and reinstalled Grub with the removable device path (whatever
that means), which wrote /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT.
However, stalling has reoccurred just a couple of times since then.
I just assumed the EFI might be slightly flaky. The laptop has a
few faults (which is why I've inherited it), like poor socketry
all round (HDMI, USB3, USB-C x 2), non-functional trackpad "buttons",
and somewhat unreliable keys.
Cheers,
David.
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