On Monday 2013-03-04 13:44, Joschi Brauchle wrote:
But now I experience a problem that was not there in virtualbox: Loading of the initrd via grub legacy from harddisk is **extremely slow** on all of the physical machines, e.g. on a very recent Core-i7 system it takes ~20 seconds, on an older Core2Duo up to 60 seconds! These times are only for loading the initrd, not booting the system! During these 20-60 seconds, the HDD led of the machines are constantly on/flashing.
The problem exists even with the "stock" kernel and initrd from the oss repo under /boot/x86_64/loader, if I copy then to the boot partition and add them to grub. The problem does **not** exist if I boot the machine from CD or PXE!
Interesting that it happens not for CD. For me, loading images (kernel/initrd) from CD/USB and PXE via ISOLINUX/SYSLINUX/PXELINUX has always been a bottleneck, because they read in what feels like 512-ish byte blocks, and synchronously so, and probably doing that through INT 13h. (The story goes similar on SPARC with the SILO loader.) In VirtualBox, practically the same happens, but it is not as noticable because of the host system's cache which kicks in from the second time. Probably GRUB does small reads too, but you just do not notice it because latency with hard disks is so much lower. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org