update-initramfs takes too long

esso82 · 05-22-2014, 06:12 AM

Hello guys, I have quite fresh install of SolydK 64bit and try to get it working smooth on my laptop Dell 15R 5537 - i5 4200U, 8GB RAM, no discreet graphics, dual booting with win8.

Few things, don't know whether they rely one on another

1. as topic subject says - generating initrd takes too long, on my headless wheezy server it's around 3 seconds I guess

Code:

esso@dell-laptop ~ $ sudo time update-initramfs -u
[sudo] password for esso: 
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.13-1-amd64
42.91user 0.47system 0:46.98elapsed 92%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 96376maxresident)k
48inputs+174856outputs (0major+1581577minor)pagefaults 0swaps

2. when I start my laptop, grub stays stuck for some 3-4 seconds before it starts to count-down, also if I press ENTER right after GRUB appears, it's stuck for those 3-4 seconds and then reacts to the input

3. After echoing "Loading initramfs" it waits further around 5 seconds, no HDD activity and then starts to boot

4. First thing I see is:

Code:

dm-raid45 not found in modules.dep

I don't use RAID, LVM or anything raid related, I run SolydK alongside win8, one partition ext4 for root, the another one ext4 for home and a swap partition

Any help appreciated. Thank you.

dijetlo · 05-23-2014, 11:32 AM

Hey Esso,

Quote:

dual booting with win8.

My guess is you're waiting while win8 bends hardware and code trying to kludge grub and boot its' silly self. Microsoft used it's "thump" with hardware manufacturers to give win8 hooks to do that. Check your manufacturers (Dell) documentation to see if they have a suggestion about bios settings.

Quote:

if I press ENTER right after GRUB appears, it's stuck for those 3-4 seconds and then reacts to the input...no HDD activity

That's why I think your problem might be in the bios.
As far as initramfs goes, that's a cpio archive, you can extract it (you probably have) and tweak it as much as you like (back up early, back up often

)
The raid issue was either created at installation by you when you asked the machine to support raid (no worries, I've done that too... would I like a raid ? Why yes, thank you very much..) or it's seeing something is sees as a raid array (I've read that solid state hard drives can trip this bug but I have no first hand experience with that.)
The rule of thumb is the kernel doesn't try to load dependencies it doesn't think it needs.