Long boot time

Have you installed a lot of packages or only the default set ?

It does that anytime or sometimes only ?

This is a clean install with only the packages installed by the desktop CD. Each boot has approximately the same timing. From the other forum posts that I've seen, it seems like the boot time I should be expecting is 60 to 90 seconds. So, something seems to be wrong on this setup.

I had this same issue, and although it is not a fix I used the following workaround.

Make a copy of the Grub menu.lst found in /boot/grub/

Now, find the line that reads along the lines of:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/hda3 ro splash quiet

I removed both splash and quiet from this line and it cut my boot time down to around 40 seconds. I hope this helps.

Thanks for the suggestion. Made the change and got a log of what was happening as the system booted. Everything went well until it got to the setting preliminary key map step and that took quite some time. From then on, all the steps seemed to take a long time. The starting kernel event manager. In total, the boot time did not seem to improve by removing those options from the loader.

I have some additional information from the boot log that may shed some light on why Ubuntu is acting so slowly on this system. The following message appeared in the boot log

Loading hardware drivers...
error receiving u
event message: No buffer space available
                                                                                               [fail]

That is the only failure message in the boot log.

Below are some timestamps from the log entries, so the items taking unusually long time can be identified:

27:04 Reading files needed to boot
28:34 Setting preliminary keymap
29:13 Preparing restricted drivers
...
29:28 Loading hardware drivers - This is where the error listed above occurs
33:08 Loading manual drivers
...
33:17 Activating swapfile swap
35:50 Configuring network interfaces
37:07 Setting up console font and keymap
39:25 Loading ACPI modules
...
40:27 Starting system message bus dbus
41:13 Starting Hardware abstraction layer hald
41:59 Starting powernowd...
/etc/rc2.d/s20powernow
d: 156: cannot create /sys/devices/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor: Directory nonexistent
41:59 CPU frequency scaling not supported
...
42:26 Running local boot scripts

It can be seen from this log that the boot takes over 15 minutes (42 - 27)!

I have run DamnSmallLinux from the CD and it seems to be very responsive, to the hardware does not appear to be the cause of the problem.

Anyone have any ideas on what is causing the problem and/or how to resolve it.

Thanks in advance.

I am having a similar issue. In my case, "Starting kernel event manager" takes about 41 seconds, for some reason:
Nov 24 10:51:12 rcS: * Starting kernel event manager...
Nov 24 10:51:53 rcS: * Loading hardware drivers...

I attach a bootchart in my system:
http://img139.imageshack.us/my.php?image=edgy200611242sk8.png

I just bought the same board and am having similar problems. But to my mind everything is slow -- about 40 times slower than one would expect it to be. After linux boots (live cd) the desktop is extremely slow too -- ask for a konsole, wait about 40 seconds to get it. Top shows that there is heavy CPU usage, not to be expected for a core 2 duo.

Are you guys only seeing the slow boot, or are you also seeing slow operation together with slow boot?

I will note that in my case, it's something in the 2.6 kernel. Edgy and Dapper both do this (live CD) as well as koppix 5 (live CD.) However knoppix 3 (2.4.27 kernel) live CD boots and runs at full speed.

I've tried disabling acpi and other such items. System seems fast in Knoppix 3, benchmarks are decent, memory bandwidth in memtest86 is extremely good.

With the speed as it is, I don't see how I can even install Edgy in order to learn more or get more logs. The install would be unbearable. Did you guys install or move an installed disk to the new mobo/cpu?

Time to toss out this motherboard (got it free with processor at Fry's -- E6600 for $279) and get another one, though that means a new video card too.

Yes, everything seemed slow. but the boot was extreme ... taking 18 minutes! Knoppix behaved similarly in my case. Fedora and Mandriva would not even boot at all. I'm evaluating SUSE 10.1 now and it looks promising.

I also had good benchmarks and memory test results, so I don't think it is the hardware.

Well, it is the hardware of course, in combination with 2.6 kernels. I just tried knoppix with 2.6.7 and it's slow there too (but not slow in 2.4.27 as I pointed out.)

The via vt8237 southbridge is pretty common out there. The ecs northbridge may be the culprit? People seem to be using this mobo OK without core 2 duos.

I don't think the boot is any slower than the system. The system is also unusably slow. Even if we do find a fix for this, installing seems out of the question at this speed, leaving the messy prospect of installing on another machine, then hoping the hardware detect does OK when you switch with whatever fix we hope for installed.

Brad said ... "Well, it is the hardware of course, in combination with 2.6 kernels. I just tried knoppix with 2.6.7 and it's slow there too (but not slow in 2.4.27 as I pointed out.)"

Well, SUSE 10.1 uses kernel 2.6.16.13 and it runs much faster than Ubuntu on this hardware.

Hmm. Good news, in a sense, because it meas the problem is something that can be fixed at the distro level. When you say "much faster" do you mean it now runs at the expected speed of a nice Core 2 Duo?

I don't have a frame of reference to answer your question. Here is a link to the live DVD download, if you would like to check it out

http://en.opensuse.org/Released_Version

I'd appreciate your thoughts on its performance.

"Everything went well until it got to the setting preliminary key map step and that took quite some time."
It would be interesting to list some informations given by running top from command line.

Go to a virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-2) (Alt-F7 to return GUI)
and login.
Then:
$top
should show you what process take how much of CPU speed, refreshing each second.
Press q to quit.
From there, showing the first few lines would be helpful.
loadavg information, and the name and how much CPU take the 3 top running process would be helpfull.

Any movement on this?

Just installing on an Intel vPro (intel core duo etc) and boot takes forever. Desktop speed is unusable.

Help!?

I am seeing this same behaviour with Edgy running under User Mode Linux - it hits "Starting Kernel Event Manager", and seems to stall there, with no CPU or disk activity on the Host OS (Ubuntu Feisty) for what must be a couple of minutes. Perhaps I should see about running a boot analysis on it as Nabla did.

I have not observed the same behaviour in VMWare, or yet on a real machine. Bear in mind that UML will be running a different Kernel (with UML extensions).

I just tried this cursed motherboard with Gutsy kubuntu. Same problem. Runs at 1/40th of normal speed or slower. No other processes are running. ("top" thinks that top itself and xorg are taking fair chunks of CPU, but not because they are out of control, but because it is like the CPU is clocking at 100mhz.)

Unbearably slow to use, you can watch it paint things on the screen sometimes. Unless somebody has a fix time to declare this mobo as cursed and discard it.

I fixed my issues with my HP vPro by putting in a bios update. Hunt around for one for your mobo.

Yes, I decided to try that yesterday (didn't see your note) and came back here to confirm that upgrading the bios with the latest from the ECS web site made the live cd operate properly, at least. I will try an install later but the outlook is good. I was getting ready to trash this board. From a feature standpoint it is actually quite useful as an "upgrade" mobo. One of the problems with motherboard upgrades (which always look tempting when you look at the price of the cheap mobo/cbu combos they sell at Fry's) is that that also means usually having to get new memory (ddr2 instead of ddr) and a new video card (pci-e instead of agp) and new disk drives (SATA instead of IDE as most new Mobos have only one IDE which means only one drive, shared with CD).

At that point you're pretty much building a new computer except for the drives. So finally, after a year, this board will let me make a decent if not great system with the older stuff.