A couple of shots in the dark below: On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 03:47:38PM -0600, Benjamin Slade wrote: > Hi Guix, > > Sometime in the past few months my Guix machine has started taking a *very* > long time to boot-up. I mean quite long, in that getting to the GRUB menu > takes literally 15 minutes (I timed it, and mean an actual literal 15 > minutes, not using exaggeration here), and then after that it still takes a > minute or two to go into the regular boot sequence. After that, the system > behaves normally, with no slowness — it's only the boot that's abnormally > slow. > > And it wasn't always like this; I've only had this issue on this machine in > the past few months.
Last June grub was updated from 2.06 to 2.12. Its possible that
something changed between those two versions that can account for this
change. You said it was a few months already but that seems rather far
back to me. If my maths is right then 2 kernel versions would be about
4 months I think, a third would be another 2 months, which could match
the timing.
> Further system details:
>
> The (unencrypted) root partition (`/dev/sda4' mounted as `/') is an XFS
> file-system, and there is also an EFI an ext4 partition (`/dev/sda1' mounted
> as `/boot/efi').
You have your EFI partition formatted ext4? I believe it is supposed to
be vfat/fat32. Perhaps the ext* driver in grub works very slowly?
> Again, the root/boot drive is unencrypted. (On an earlier Guix machine a few
> years back I had fulldisk encryption with LUKS, but this was a bit slow to
> unlock during boot, but on order of 2-3 minutes and not 15(!). But I decided
> for this machine to only have `/home' be encrypted and leave the system
> partition unencrypted in order to speed up boot.... which worked for a
> while....until of course the issue reference in this email started.)
I've heard that the decryption is single-threaded and not hardware
accelerated, so 2-3 minutes sounds like it's very possible in that case.
> I've had the same issue running 6.12 and 6.13 kernels (and maybe 6.11, though
> I can't remember).
>
> Other potential relevant `operating-system' configuration includes:
>
> ,----
> | (operating-system
> | (kernel linux-6.13)
> | (kernel-arguments
> | (cons* "modprobe.blacklist=pcspkr,snd_pcsp"
> | "psmouse.proto=imps"
> | "acpi_osi=Linux"
> | "thinkpad_acpi.fan_control=1"
> | %default-kernel-arguments))
> | (initrd microcode-initrd)
> | (firmware (list linux-firmware))
> | (locale "en_GB.utf8")
> | (timezone "America/Denver")
> | (keyboard-layout (keyboard-layout "us"))
> | (host-name "thinkguix")
> | (users (cons* (user-account
> | (name "emacsomancer")
> | (comment "E. Max O'Mancer")
> | (group "users")
> | (home-directory "/home/emacsomancer")
> | (supplementary-groups
> | '("wheel" "netdev" "audio" "video" "adbusers")))
> | %base-user-accounts))
> | (groups (append (list (user-group (name "adbusers"))) %base-groups))
> | ....
> `----
>
> I'm not sure what would cause this sort of issue, so I'm not sure where to
> look. (But it's quite frustrating for (re)boots of the system take over 15
> minutes!)
IIRC linux-firmware is a large package, does it get copied to the EFI
partition? Do you have a lot of old system generations? For comparison
my /boot/efi directory is 6.3 Mb.
I'd suggest trying a boot without the microcode and/or the firmware and
seeing if that makes grub show up faster. And I'd ask in nonguix if
anyone else is having similar problems.
> Is it likely to be something that's changed in Guix that interacts with my
> `config.scm'? Something to do with the physical hardware? (I haven't changed
> any of the physical components; and I don't have any reason to think there's
> anything wrong with root/boot SSD drive otherwise.) I'm really not sure how
> to debug here.
>
> thanks,
> —Benjamin
> --
> '(Dr Benjamin Slade (he/him)
> (website . <https://lambda-y.net>)
> `(pgp_fp: ,(B20E 444C FA80 B5F8 15FA 4AD8 6FBF CD68 3B05 2B84))
> "sent by [mu4e] 1.12.8 in [Emacs] 30.0.93 with [org-msg] on [GNU Guix]
> ([Linux])")
>
>
> [mu4e] <https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html>
>
> [Emacs] <https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/>
>
> [org-msg] <https://github.com/jeremy-compostella/org-msg>
>
> [GNU Guix] <https://guix.gnu.org/>
>
> [Linux] <https://opensource.com/resources/linux>
--
Efraim Flashner <efr...@flashner.co.il> אפרים פלשנר
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