On 23/09/13 09:56, John Andersen wrote:

Hi Dylan, just wondering how much help you expect when your biggest complaint is 5 seconds? B-)

I should have such problems!

Hi John, I'm not really concerned about the time, to be honest - as you imply, it's no great shakes. On the other hand, it seems to take a proportionately long time on the machine in question (and longer than on other machines which I'd expect to be slower,) which prompts my interest in knowing what goes on during the (somewhat opaque) "loading initial ramdisk..." message. This would, of course, increase my understanding of the system in general... Dx

Dylan <dylan@dylan.me.uk> wrote:

...

Hi All,

How do I go about finding out what's going on with the initrd?

On one of my machines (an 8-core unit with SSD root drive) there is a 5

second wait while loading initrd, and the rest of the boot process takes a further 5 seconds...

On the other desktop (dual-core, standard HDs) and an old (3years+) netbook (celeron with old SSD) the initrd is loaded within a second.

I'm working on the hypothesis that the main machine's initrd is doing or loading a lot more than on the other two machines, but how do I find out.

In fact, since there is no separate /boot partition, I'm wondering if I

even need the initrd? If not, how do I disable it?

Cheers Dylan

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Per Jessen wrote:

Dylan wrote:

...

In fact, since there is no separate /boot partition, I'm wondering if I even need the initrd? If not, how do I disable it?

You need the initrd unless you've compiled every needed module into the kernel.

Check the size of your initrd in /boot. Also, you could try adding "compact" to your lilo config (or the equivalent to your grub ditto).

The only thing you need to compile into the kernel are the modules needed for the system to boot -- not "every needed module"... Example... if you don't boot off of net, you probably don't need it built-in (won't hurt if it is, but not needed). Likely need "some disk controller" (whatever your boot disk's controller is) "some file system" (depending on your boot fs... mine is xfs, so xfs is the only file system built-in to my kernel). Same for disk controller... I have 1 LSI controllers, so no matter which I boot from, it needs to be there. Some compress algorithm (seems reading a raw image on boot isn't supported -- though with SSD's it 'should'...lowest overhead is lzop, you'll need the "dm" modules get the device manage. Probably some ACPI functions if you have a laptop.. Many things are auto selected in as part of a running machine. But you just need enough to boot your root disk and mount it... THEN, the kernel can load the other stuff AS modules out of /lib/modules/<kernelversion> on demand. Network, other file systems. ---- You might have to experiment, but a good way to find your ened drivers is, shortly after a fresh boot, look at:

sudo lspci -k|grep Kern|sort|uniq|cut -f2 -d:|tr -d "\n"

That shows me: bnx2 e1000e ehci-pci i7core_edac ioatdma ixgbe lpc_ich megaraid_sas pcieport uhci_hcd --- Now the above list includes things loaded at boot, needed for a fully running system -- not just what is needed to boot. Needed to boot: megaraid_sas and maybe pcieport. The rest are for normal system function on top of boot. Everything is is build as a loadable module I load after boot from disk... After 20 days uptime, 33 have been loaded: acpi_cpufreq auth_rpcgss bnx2 button ebtable_nat ebtables edd enclosure fuse intel_powerclamp ipmi_poweroff ipmi_watchdog ipt_MASQUERADE iptable_filter iptable_nat ixgbe kvm kvm_intel lockd mdio mperf nf_conntrack nf_conntrack_ipv4 nf_defrag_ipv4 nf_nat nf_nat_ipv4 nfs_acl nfsd processor ses sunrpc wmi xt_conntrack k # modprobe <completion> shows unloaded modules [on my sys]: # modprobe Display all 361 possibilities? (y or n) --- So 361 modules not loaded that I could for devel/experimenting (like ALL the netfilter /conntracking mods, all the file system mods, etc...). A kernel build takes almost 4 minutes with all those! The OS loads, and all devices are initialized, in about 17 seconds. The last 7 seconds of that are mounting ~ 14 file systems w/30+TB of space. So that's about 10 seconds from the time the lilo unpacks the kernel to it having most of the HW ready, but it's also bringing up 12 cores (2cpus) x96G most @ idle speed of 1.6GHz (full speed up to 2.8), 3 disk controllers and ~32 HD's. Then services start to come up. network starts coming up 2 seconds into that and takes an additional 3 seconds . All the services take ... ~another 10-15 seconds...but haven't touched that part of the process yet to optimize it. Caveat -- times above are not using systemd ;-/ Am running 12.3+factory ... but stuck w/sysVinit for now, since I also still have separate boot/root/usr and usr-share partitions. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, 24 Sep 2013 18:59:24 Linda Walsh wrote: [...]

Am running 12.3+factory ... but stuck w/sysVinit for now, since I also still have separate boot/root/usr and usr-share partitions.

So do I, but systemd isn't complaining about it...seems quite happy (even it if is a convoluted PITA to learn how to manage compared to sys V init... -- ============================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au ============================================================== -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org