Re: 45 minute boot time with 2.6.4/2.6.6-mm5 kernel on 1.7GHz laptop

[Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@csd.uu.se>]

Matthew Denner writes:
 > Mikael Pettersson wrote:
 > > Matthew Denner writes:
 > >  > On Saturday I installed SuSE 9.1 Personal on my laptop and I'm beginning 
 > >  > to wonder whether this was a bad idea.  It takes my laptop (a Pentium-M 
 > >  > Centrino 1.7Ghz with 1GB DDR RAM and 40GB HDD) 45 minutes to boot (from 
 > >  > selecting "linux" in GRUB to having the KDE interface up and running). 
 > >  > It spends about 20-25 minutes in the boot procedure before it even gets 
 > >  > to starting X.  Yesterday I managed to tidy my front room, put some 
 > > 
 > > Sounds a lot like a BIOS MTRR problem we've seen before, where
 > > the BIOS fails to make the top-most part of physical RAM cacheable.
 > > 
 > > Send the contents of /proc/mtrr and the head of dmesg (the part
 > > that shows the physical memory map) to LKML.
 > 
 > I would have done this ealier, had I not broken everything with my last 
 > kernel rebuild and had to re-install!  Kernel is back to 2.6.4.
 > 
 > The output of /proc/mtrr is:
 > 
 > reg00: base=0x00000000 (   0MB), size= 512MB: write-back, count=1
 > reg01: base=0x20000000 ( 512MB), size= 256MB: write-back, count=1
 > reg02: base=0x30000000 ( 768MB), size= 128MB: write-back, count=1
 > reg03: base=0x38000000 ( 896MB), size=  64MB: write-back, count=1
 > reg04: base=0x3c000000 ( 960MB), size=  32MB: write-back, count=1
 > reg05: base=0x3e000000 ( 992MB), size=  16MB: write-back, count=1
 > reg06: base=0xf0000000 (3840MB), size=   4MB: write-combining, count=1
 > 
 > And the physical RAM map bit is:
 > 
 > BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
 >   BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
 >   BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
 >   BIOS-e820: 00000000000e0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
 >   BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000003f7d0000 (usable)
 >   BIOS-e820: 000000003f7d0000 - 000000003f7df000 (ACPI data)
 >   BIOS-e820: 000000003f7df000 - 000000003f800000 (ACPI NVS)
 >   BIOS-e820: 00000000fff80000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)

And here we see a, possibly the, problem.
The BIOS gives us usable memory up to 0x3f7cffff, but the
corresponding MTTR stops short at 0x3effffff, which leaves
the 8MB in [0x3f000000,0x3f7cffff] usable but uncached.

Any access to that range will be sloooow.

This is unfortunately not an uncommon BIOS error. You may want to
check for BIOS updates, or file a bug report with the HW vendor.

Booting with "mem=1008M" appended to the kernel's options
should fix the performance issue.

/Mikael