Slow Porteus 3.2RC5 boot on SSD

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advb69
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Slow Porteus 3.2RC5 boot on SSD

Post#1 by advb69 » 29 Oct 2016, 15:13

I have come across strange boot speed performance issue when booting Porteus 3.2 RC5 on an SSD. I'm not sure if it is a bug or not so forgive me if I have posted this in the wrong forum.

My laptop is a dual boot Windows 10 and Porteus machine, using EasyBCD/NeoGrub for the dual boot. Windows is on an NTFS partition and Porteus is on a separate EXT4 partition.

I recently upgraded the drive to an SSD. The SSD is an exact clone of the original disk and the partitions are properly aligned. As expected, Windows 10 loads and performs much faster and Porteus 3.1 loads a couple of seconds faster.

However, Porteus 3.2 RC5 loads about 10 seconds slower. The initial text loading process does load several seconds faster but when the cursor disappears and the screen goes black, it takes about 20 seconds or more before the GUI appears. During this phase, there is a about 10 second gap where the disk activity light doesn't come on at all. (When booting from the original HDD, this phase is much shorter and there is constant disk activity.)

It doesn't matter if I use Cinnamon or Mate versions or if I use the base_only or copy2RAM cheat codes. I boot from the ISO image but I have also tried unpacking it and performance is the same. If I boot and load RC5 via a separate USB 2 stick, it loads faster than the SSD!

Windows 10 (from boot to logon prompt)
HDD - 29 seconds
SDD - 14 seconds

Porteus 3.1 Mate (from boot to desktop)
HDD - 23 seconds
SDD - 20 seconds

Porteus 3.2 RC5 (from boot to desktop)
HDD - 23 seconds
SDD - 32 seconds
USB 2 - 26 seconds

Windows 10 now is much brisker when running on the SSD so the upgrade is definitely worth it. RC5 does run fine after the initial boot delay but I'd obviously like to improve the initial boot speed. I want Porteus to beat the Windows boot time!

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks!

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Re: Slow Porteus 3.2RC5 boot on SSD

Post#2 by Blaze » 29 Oct 2016, 16:13

I have too HDD and SSD.
On the SSD Porteus boot up faster then on the HDD.
I use this SSD on 64Gb

Code: Select all

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/FREE-shipping-FASTDISK-new-ssd-disk-2-5-INCH-SATA3-256G-Solid-Sate-Disk-hard-drive/1677876644.html
Linux 6.6.11-porteus #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sun Jan 14 12:07:37 MSK 2024 x86_64 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 v6 @ 3.80GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
MS-7A12 » [AMD/ATI] Navi 23 [Radeon RX 6600] [1002:73ff] (rev c7) » Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 K2 3200MHz C16

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brokenman
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Re: Slow Porteus 3.2RC5 boot on SSD

Post#3 by brokenman » 29 Oct 2016, 16:26

I also use an SSD. Porteus boots in 15 seconds for me.

Perhaps the logs will reveal some useful information. Upload a system info dump to pastebin and link to it here.
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advb69
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Re: Slow Porteus 3.2RC5 boot on SSD

Post#4 by advb69 » 29 Oct 2016, 22:14

Thanks Brokenman. More than happy to do this. I have dumped the full log and uploaded it to http://pastebin.ca/3734144.

I'm afraid I'm still a Linux noob. I couldn't see anything obvious in the logs but then that's no surprise.

BTW, good work with RC5 - I love the look and feel of Cinnamon!

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Re: Slow Porteus 3.2RC5 boot on SSD

Post#5 by brokenman » 30 Oct 2016, 00:31

It appears to be a driver problem. If the screen goes black and this is where the bottleneck is then most likely it is a graphics problem. Strange since the i915 kernel driver is running your graphics card. This is relatively stable and reliable.

I can't see any obvious problems in the logs. Can you please try a few things for me:

1) Boot in always fresh mode (not just base_only) so that no other modules at all are loaded except for the 00X base modules.
2) Try disabling hibernate or suspend in the bios.
3) If booting with a network cable plugged in please remove it when booting.
4) Supply the model of the SSD you are using.

Generally speaking it is not a good idea to clone an older drive onto a newer SSD drive. A fresh install is always best. This was certainly the case for me, but it sounds to me like you know what you are doing.
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Re: Slow Porteus 3.2RC5 boot on SSD

Post#6 by burdi01 » 30 Oct 2016, 09:50

I also had a look at the logs.
To me it looks like 12 secs (22:23:49 -> 22:24:01) are spent on a dhcp6 (wlan0): activation.
I would recommend booting with IPv6 disabled.
:D

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brokenman
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Re: Slow Porteus 3.2RC5 boot on SSD

Post#7 by brokenman » 30 Oct 2016, 16:50

Step 3 should reveal if this is the case although I don't think it would halt graphics. Let's see.
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advb69
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Re: Slow Porteus 3.2RC5 boot on SSD

Post#8 by advb69 » 30 Oct 2016, 22:08

Thanks for your suggestions guys.

@burdi01 - I normally only use WiFi so I disabled IPV6 in the WiFi adapter configuration. (I did try the noipv6 cheat-code but it didn't seem work.) The boot time was no quicker. Out of curiosity, I disabled WiFi using the hardware switch and the boot time was even longer!

@brokenman
To answer your suggestions in order:
1) - I tried always fresh mode (ie nomagic base_only norootcopy cheatcodes). No change. I even created a new partition and used the Porteus installer to create a fresh set of the files there, just in case I'd screwed up somewhere on the normal partition. Sadly, that made no difference.
2) There isn't any option I can find in the BIOS for suspend or hibernate.
3) I don't use a network cable but tried booting with one anyway. Again, no quicker.
4) I am using a Intel 520 240GB SSD.

Given that the only hardware change is the SSD and Windows 10 is running fast on it, I might try copying Porteus onto the NTFS partition and try that. I'd rather not format the SSD and start completely from scratch but it might be the only way to work out what is wrong.

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