From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from lists.gentoo.org (pigeon.gentoo.org [208.92.234.80]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by finch.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id AA251138334 for ; Mon, 22 Oct 2018 20:12:44 +0000 (UTC) Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 48421E0956; Mon, 22 Oct 2018 20:12:36 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail.muc.de (colin.muc.de [193.149.48.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 8D9BBE0942 for ; Mon, 22 Oct 2018 20:12:34 +0000 (UTC) Received: (qmail 18260 invoked by uid 3782); 22 Oct 2018 20:12:33 -0000 Received: from acm.muc.de (p5B1472A5.dip0.t-ipconnect.de [91.20.114.165]) by colin.muc.de (tmda-ofmipd) with ESMTP; Mon, 22 Oct 2018 22:12:33 +0200 Received: (qmail 16576 invoked by uid 1000); 22 Oct 2018 20:03:54 -0000 Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2018 20:03:54 +0000 To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: [gentoo-user] Irritating ~5s pause whilst booting with grub Message-ID: <20181022200354.GC4585@ACM> Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.10.1 (2018-07-13) X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/1.1.12 (Macallan) From: Alan Mackenzie X-Primary-Address: acm@muc.de X-Archives-Salt: f409fc6d-595a-46f3-8240-7b1baa44f2a0 X-Archives-Hash: 3e5a2fd7256c0487412ef9369153855d 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).