[gentoo-user] Irritating ~5s pause whilst booting with grub

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Gentoo,

This isn't a critical problem, but it's a little irritating.

When my machine boots, it first displays the BIOS invitation to type F2,
then starts grub.  Grub spends about 5 seconds with a blank screen, and
an underline cursor dotting about randomly in the top left hand area of
the screen, possibly some 25 x 80 area (whatever that might mean).  Only
then does it display its boot menu.

My machine is a standard up to date (18 months old) AMD-64 Ryzen machine
booting from EFI.

Looking into my /boot/grub/grub.conf, I've got:

    # Menu timeout
    timeout=10

: the irritating delay is ~5 seconds, so this can't be due to anything
dependant on that timeout setting; and

    # If we have a font available, start graphical output.
    if loadfont unifont; then
            echo "Loading unifont"
            # Output resolution for GRUB (eg. 1024x768 or 'auto').
            gfxmode=auto

            # Output resolution for Linux (VESAFB only).
            # 'keep' means use the same resolution as GRUB.
            # For other framebuffer drivers, pass a resolution using the
            # video= kernel param.
            gfxpayload=keep

            # Load all video drivers.
            insmod all_video

            # Switch to graphical output.
            terminal_output gfxterm
    fi

.  I'm wondering if my problem has something to do with the 'insmod
all_video', and then the system is trying out lots of different video
modes, each with a long timeout, before finally finding the correct one.
Would, perhaps, a more specific value of gfxmode help?

Also, as an aside, grub has 878 .c files and a user's info guide
weighing in at 300 kbytes.  It's great that the documentation exists,
but 300k?  This is all just for a boot system.  There are 255 loadable
modules.  (For comparison, the Emacs core has just 132 .c files.)  I
can't help feeling that this has got horribly out of hand.

I just need a program to boot the machine, that's all - I don't really
care what colours it uses, what fonts it uses, it only needs to read a
GPT partition table, and boot on utterly standard hardware.  I
appreciate having a menu of different boot options (in my case, this
just means different kernel versions), but everything else is just
aesthetic sugar.  Too much sugar isn't good for one.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).