initrd.img takes a long time to load when booting Slackware from USB

dugan · 11-07-2013, 01:34 PM

I have a USB boot disk created with usbimg2disk.sh. The "loading initrd.img" step (the one with the row of horizontal dots) takes a long time. How can I speed it up?

I'm using a USB3 boot disk on a USB2 system, and my USB BIOS settings should be correct (i.e. not crippled).

business_kid · 11-07-2013, 01:41 PM

sounds like initrd is massive. You really only need the root filesystem, usb & usb storage, motherboard chipset & anything else to get your root drive mounted & being read. Then it can grab the module tree. Fedora has 31MB of modules on my initrd. Every driver for every system ever made :-/.

dugan · 11-07-2013, 01:44 PM

You're right.

Code:

➜  syslinux  du -h initrd.img 
30M	initrd.img

Alien Bob · 11-07-2013, 02:54 PM

Well the initrd is so big because it contains the Slackware installer... it needs to support everything.
The long loading times are caused by your USB stick - it's quite common. Buying one with faster read speeds will help.

Eric

kikinovak · 11-07-2013, 04:46 PM

I'm often setting up HP Proliant Microservers. This kind of hardware has no optical drive, so I have to install Slackware using a USB stick. Loading the initrd takes up to five minutes on these machines.

volkerdi · 11-07-2013, 09:03 PM

One nice thing about UEFI is that the kernel/initrd load much faster from USB.

aikempshall · 11-08-2013, 11:18 AM

I always change usbimg2disk.sh to remove the -s flag to syslinux. Here's a diff

Code:

diff usbimg2disk.sh.bak usbimg2disk.sh
472c472
< /usr/bin/syslinux -s -d /syslinux $TARGETPART 1>>$LOGFILE 2>&1
---
> /usr/bin/syslinux -d /syslinux $TARGETPART 1>>$LOGFILE 2>&1

Speeds things up considerably

Alexc

aikempshall · 11-08-2013, 11:20 AM

btw. If it works for others perhaps we can have it as an optional flag to usbimg2disk.sh

Alex