On 03/04/2013 06:23 PM, Larry Finger wrote:
With grub2, it loads in 2-3 seconds on an HP dv2815 laptop with a modest AMD Turion CPU at 2 GHz.
The difference might be grub2, or it might be due to poor performance for an i7 running in 8686-compatibility mode. I doubt that Intel spent much time optimizing those operations.
Larry
So, out of curiosity I switched to grub2 and voila, initrd is loaded in "no time", i.e. faster than I can see on the screen really. No more 10 second delay with grub2. Switching back to grub reverts to slow boot. I was not seeing any need to switch to grub2 until now, but this speed difference (especially if it reduces boot times to normal on older Core2Duo machines) makes a significant difference. Is there any explanation for this (beyond what was already discussed)? I feel like there must be something wrong with grub on 12.3 and not that it is a simple "initrd size" issue... as mentioned initially, on 11.4 initrd loads instantly (11MB) but on 12.3 (32MB) takes in the order of 30-60 seconds. Sure it's 3 times as big, but takes about 30 times as long to load.