Xen booting delay

[marmarek]

Reported by joanna on 25 Jun 2012 14:23 UTC
I observe now a long delay (~30 sec) between the time I choose a kernel from GRUB, and the time I see the first "(XEN)" messages (after I removed the console= switch). Strange...

Migrated-From: https://wiki.qubes-os.org/ticket/606

[marmarek]

Comment by marmarek on 25 Jun 2012 15:46 UTC
I've seen some delay (but order of 10s, not 30) when had almost full /boot partition. Perhaps this is the case?

[marmarek]

Comment by marmarek on 25 Jun 2012 15:46 UTC
I've seen some delay (but order of 10s, not 30) when had almost full /boot partition. Perhaps this is the case?

[marmarek]

Comment by joanna on 28 Jun 2012 09:33 UTC
Indeed, it seems to be caused by heavily fragmented /boot partition (not necessarily full, but fragmented)

[marmarek]

Comment by joanna on 28 Jun 2012 09:33 UTC
Indeed, it seems to be caused by heavily fragmented /boot partition (not necessarily full, but fragmented)

[marmarek]

Comment by joanna on 28 Jun 2012 09:34 UTC
... and it seems to be GRUB's fault.

[marmarek]

Comment by joanna on 28 Jun 2012 09:34 UTC
... and it seems to be GRUB's fault.

[marmarek]

Comment by marmarek on 2 Jul 2012 00:06 UTC
Our grub is no longer supported by upstream, so there is little chance that this will be fixed there and we don't want to dig into grub filesystem support code. Maybe some day we will upgrade system in dom0, and then use grub2, which hopefully better support fragmented filesystem.

As a workaround one can recreate /boot filesystem:

cp -a /boot /boot.bak
umount /boot
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 # or where you have /boot
mount /boot
mv /boot.bak/* /boot
rmdir /boot.bak

[marmarek]

Comment by marmarek on 2 Jul 2012 00:06 UTC
Our grub is no longer supported by upstream, so there is little chance that this will be fixed there and we don't want to dig into grub filesystem support code. Maybe some day we will upgrade system in dom0, and then use grub2, which hopefully better support fragmented filesystem.

As a workaround one can recreate /boot filesystem:

cp -a /boot /boot.bak
umount /boot
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1 # or where you have /boot
mount /boot
mv /boot.bak/* /boot
rmdir /boot.bak