9.10 bootup lacks refinement (excessive scrolling, font + text-mode switches)

[Paul Sladen]

As of 2009-09-29, a boot of Ubuntu 9.10 alpha looks like this:

 0:00 power switch on
 0:05 BIOS boilerplate
 0:20 Grub menu (80x25, VGA font) + count down begins
 0:25 "Starting up..." (80x25, VGA font)
 0:27 Text font change (80x25, custom font)
 0:45 Text mode change (160x50, VGA font)
 1:00 Text font change (160x50, custom font)
 1:05 Black (completely blank) screen
 1:08 Xsplash, arrow pointer
 1:17 GDM login (...user interaction required)
 1:24 Xsplash, hourglass pointer
 1:38 Backlight brightness level change
 1:39 GNOME top + bottom panels appear
 1:48 Desktop background loaded
 2:04 Desktop Icons *start* appearing
 2:24 Desktop Icons *finish* appearing (448 items)
 2:25 Click Firefox loader icon
 2:47 Firefox appears

There are around ~10 times during boot when the screen has visibly jarred/changed without due cause (eg. font, or brightness change). There is *30 seconds* of 1990s-style classic scrolling text bootup (primarily udev and ntp error messages).

Ideally font and text mode dimensions changes should be combined to occur at the same point in time.

Ideally Usplash should be displayed if textual scroll will have has been displayed for more ~3 seconds.

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

Couple of points:

0. The time from BIOS to Grub is nothing we can affect...I suggest contacting your machine manufacturer
1. Grub Menu only shows if you have more than one OS installed..assuming you've migrated to the now default grub2
2. There is nothing we can do with the flicker between grub and the kernel loading
3. We are attempting to resolve all chatty kernel messages and those printed by systems started before xsplash. We could bring back usplash, but would add an ADDITIONAL mode change
4. GDM login is not required if you enable autologin. If you need to login, then that's just something you'll need to deal with...although we are looking at cleaning it up a bit in Lucid
5. I actually don't mind the hourglass pointer...and apparently Windows doesn't either...and Apple has the pinwheel
6. the brightness change is an issue, but something we probably can't fix in time for 9.10
7. currently xsplash as a timeout of 15 sec...should probably be longer for slow computers such as yours

If you'd like to install bootchart and attach to this bug, we can look at why your machine takes so long to boot

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Bootchart from boot in question (transpose by 25 seconds to align stopwatch notes and bootchart); I suspect there may be a large number of such "slow" machines in circulation:

  $ grep model\ name /proc/cpuinfo ; grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo
  model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz
  MemTotal: 2053336 kB

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

On Fri, 2009-10-02 at 14:15 +0000, Paul Sladen wrote:
> Bootchart from boot in question (transpose by 25 seconds to align
> stopwatch notes and bootchart); I suspect there may be a large number
> of such "slow" machines in circulation:
>
> $ grep model\ name /proc/cpuinfo ; grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo
> model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7300 @ 2.00GHz
> MemTotal: 2053336 kB
How fast is your harddrive? sreadahead is running far too long in this
bootchart, so either you were profiling (in which case you need to
reboot again) or you are running into bug 432089

[Dana Goyette (danagoyette)]

Hmm, I seem to have having similar issues on my laptop (Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, 7200RPM hard drive). Oddly enough, I have sometimes seen udevd sit there for around 10 seconds, doing seemingly nothing.

I believe in my case, sreadahead may just not be working -- I see spew at boot of "No suitable fs found in /proc/mounts, perhaps not nounted?"