Suse 9.2 runs in slow motion
 

I just installed Suse 9.2 on my laptop (Alienware Sentia, Celeron 2GHz, 1GHz RAM) in the hopes of getting better mobile support. I've been running Mandrake 10.0, which mostly works, but I thought I'd try Suse.

The install went OK, but when it rebooted into Linux, the text boot screen went painfully slowly. One...character...at...a...time. I had to leave it on all night just to boot!

Once it booted, it seemed to run, but also very slowly.

Anyone else had this problem? Is there a solution?

I had tried the Mandrake 10.1 beta, and it exhibited the same problem on this system. I chalked that up to it just being a beta; but now it looks like something Linux doesn't like in my system.

I had similar problems on both a desktop machine (Athlon XP 3000 on GA 7N400Pro 2 board) and laptop (Dell X200). Both seem to improve when adding boot parameters "acpi=on apic" (where I believe the first parameter is actually the default - just making sure). Try simply adding these on the boot screen. If it works, modify /boot/grub/menu.lst .

I also experienced a LOT of problems with a runaway hotplug process that slowed the system down, after the boot process. Might want to check that too.

Well, I tried this and that doesn't seem to have fixed it. The boot screen runs at normal speed up to this:

VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)
Starting udev
Creating devices


And then it appears to hang; however, if I give it long enough (like, I don't know, an hour?), it'll come back & resume booting in slow motion.

I have encountered exactly the same problem on a MaxData Vision 4200X Notebook on an Intel Pentium 4 Processor with Hyperthreadding.

I installed SuSE 9.2 and my computer runs in slow motion from the start it reaches the "Creating devices" entry during startup. I already tried many settings but in the end I guess it has something to do with special kernel modules.

Funnily when you boot SuSE 9.2 from a live CD on the same computer the problem does not occur, and SuSE 9.2 from the live CD uses the same kernel, but probably without optimizations for laptops...

Is there anybody who has the same probelm and could solve it?

Thx, Sascha.....*>

Since then, I've also tried Mandrake 10.1, which does the same thing. Mandrake 10.0 runs fine. Also, I've just tried Fedora Core 3, and it seems to exhibit this behavior in the installer. I would suspect that it's something in the kernel; but considering your note that the live CD doesn't do this, I'm not so sure.

I'm not an expert in these things but as I know SuSE installs an optimized kernel for notebooks. The kernel on the live cd is hence different than the kernel on my notebook.

If we knew which modules are responsible for creating devices, one could probably investigate and find out what's going wrong here.

Has anyone an idea?

I have strong impression that it's related to udev, the replacement for devfs.

Mandrake 10.0 runs fine on my laptop (except for wireless, suspend, etc); the speed is just fine. However, the newer distros such as Mandrake 10.1, Fedora Core 3, and of course Suse 9.2, utilize udev instead of devfs.

The other reason I have this impression is that, while my Suse install is booting, it runs at full speed right until I see 'starting udev', followed by 'creating devices'; then, it runs very slowly.

I don't know a lot about udev, except that it's supposed to provide your system with better dynamic hardware detection (ie USB plugins, CDROMs, etc).

I may try to reinstall Mandrake 10.1, and select devfs instead of udev, if they still allow installation of it. Does Suse allow you to not install udev? I don't know if their package selection gives you such a fine level of control.

This is a very good point. I found out that you can compile the kernel with both options using devfs and udev. With the bootoption gentoo=noudev you then can let the kernel use devfs instead of udev. The following website has more information about that device thing http://webpages.charter.net/decibels....html#lilogrub.

Unfortunately I didn't have the time yet to try that out but next thing I'm gonna do is try out if the standard kernel of SuSE has devfs compiled and if not I will have to find out how to compile the kernel (I've never done that yet). And hopefully this will solve the problem.

Thanx for the hint and I will come back with my results :-)

Sascha.....*>

Well, good news!

I've been working with Suse support on this, and they suggested that, since my laptop has 1 GB of RAM, that may be a problem. It has something to do with the cache size the motherboard supports, combined with the way Linux uses memory. The wrong kind of motherboard cache support can cause Linux to not have access to cache memory, causing it to run very slowly (or something like that).

Anyway, they suggested I enter this on the boot command line (added after the other boot params):

mem=512M

Sure enough, my system is now running very fast!

If your system has a lot of RAM, you should try this; let me know if it works.

This is really good news. In fact also my laptop has 1 GB of RAM. Funnily that this amount of memory causes such an obscure effect. I will try it tomorrow and let you know if the boot option helped. I'm quite sure it will...

Thx again for your support, Sascha.....*>

my laptop has a usb 2.0 controller that causes the boot to hang at pcmcia. It is not compatable I've been told. Apparently Linux has very poor USB 2.0 support. If you have USB 2.0 on your machine this could be the case. Apparently it is because my card is 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 compatable and Linux doesn't know how to assign the proper resources. Something like that. Just my personal experience.

That's it! I entered the boot option mem=512M and then the system starts as normally as I would expect it to.

Thank you for your help!

Another point I've found:

Entering this option will limit the amount of RAM available to Linux to 512MB. You can try a larget number, like

mem=768M

This will give Linux more memory. (Note that if you enter a larger number than you physically have memory for, Linux will crash.)

Also, I used my boot loader configuration to add this option permanently so I don't have to type it in every time.

Onward then!

Even mem=1008M works on my laptop, whereas mem=1016M causes the cache problem. But with nearly as much memory to use as installed I am also quite satisfied... :-)

I had a similar problem when I first installed suse 9.1 personal on my Gateway 500x Desktop. I use a router to supply the highspeed cable modem connection and so I thought I needed to configure NIS for connecting to the net the first time. Second time I installed, I just left the NIS config.box blank and let DHCP do all the work of setting up the network connection. It worked much faster the second time and in the process discovered it was no longer searching for YP Bind that didn't exist. What use to take 9 minutes to boot up, now boots in less than 1 minute. Everything else in the KDE desktop also work much faster as well. With your laptop, you may not need NIS/yp bind either. If so, you can disable it by using YaST and go to System then Runlevel Editor. At the bottom of choices, you will find the control for YP Bind. If it says yes, just change it to no. If for some reason that makes it worse, just go back the the runlevel editor and change it back to yes.