slow boot 10.04
 

My system after installing Ubuntu 10.04 has an annoying 30 second pause during the boot process. It comes after BIOS checks and before the splash screen, the monitor is just black with a flashing cursor.

The system has two IDE drives (/boot and /home) and a SCSI drive (/). There is a SCSI MO drive on it's own controller. Partial lspci:

01:09.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AIC-7892B U160/m (rev 02)
01:0a.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c810 (rev 23)

I attached a clip from bootchart and a boot log file. Could someone give me a clue?

looks like the plymouth daemon is causing the delay. Try removing it.

Hi,
In case that does not work. Go to the /etc/default/grub and change the timeout value to 5 or 3 (this would be in seconds) and reboot. This will cause grub to boot the default os in the specified seconds.
Hope this helps.

Hi
I've just looked at the bootchart for my laptop, the main difference between it and your chart is the section when udevd and modprobe are running in the early stages.
I'm new to these sort of problems but a few quick searches told me that udevd synchronizes the various processes involved in booting up a computer to make sure events happen in the correct order, and that modprobe installs loadable kernel modules for automatically detected hardware.
I suspect that you'll have to give details of your hardware so that people cleverer than me can help you.

Martin

The Plymouth daemon? Trying to remove it from Ubuntu 10.04 will remove half the system with it!

Here's what I suggest: Download the Ubuntu 10.10 ISO image, use usb-creator-gtk (System -> Administration -> Startup Disk Creator) to write the image to a USB flash drive, boot from the USB drive, and then install 10.10. You'd be glad how much faster your system will boot.

spiderbatdad:
Renamed /sbin/plymouthd to plymouthd.orig. no bootsplash, but still have 30 second delay. the /etc/init/plymouthd.conf says plymouth runs from initrd. How can I disable it there?

SilverBack:
Changed timeout to 3. No effect.

martinbc:
System is Athlon XP 2800 in Asus A7N8X-X motherboard.
Attached is the report from Ubuntu system test. It is gzipped (why can't I upload a .gz file directly?).

Kenny:
I was kinda hoping to stay with the Long Term release. It took me a month and a half to get the system to the condition is is in.

You are dealing with 2 things here. Plymouthd which is probably wise to leave alone and Plymouth. Plymouth is jsut a graphics generator that is easy to avoid. It depends on libplymouth2 which is where plymouthd comes from.

Plymouthd is your boot manager and is in charge of writing error logs and so forth about the boot process. It is not very good at that.

If you go to /etc/default/grub and remove the splash from the instruction string (ro quite splash) and then run update-grub you will have no more boot splash and you should boot somewhat faster.

Plymouth is a problem for a lot of folks. I can't really use 10.04 as it needs too many tweeks to get it to boot and then will not shut down.

You may want to try 10.10 which has better patched Plymouth if you are not worried about long term support.

Commented out this line:
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
It boots a little bit faster about 1 minute total but still seems to be fussing with SCSI matters for an inordinate amount of time.

Dmesg attached

That speed is actually pretty fair in my experience. There are a lot of folks who do a lot better but the results are pretty inconsistent among all hardware configurations.

I would not have commented out the entire line, just removed the "splash". If it works for you that is great.

If this is an old installation that has been upgraded you may want to consider saving your data and doing a clean install. This is particularly true if you are on ext3. If you are, a clean install, without splash, could get you to somewhere in the 25 to 45 second range.

There is a gain in all around speed and performance too that you will notice.

OK, I guess I will live with it.
This was a clean install, converting from SuSE 11.0.

Thanks for your help.