Re: Slow grub boot when /boot/grub is not on first partition

[Felix Zielcke]

Am Samstag, den 31.10.2009, 20:03 +0100 schrieb Vladimir 'phcoder'
Serbinenko:
> Simon Wagner wrote:
> > Hello dear GRUB2 developers,
> >
> > I am a user of Ubuntu 9.10, which uses GRUB2 1.97. Unfortunately
> GRUB
> > needs a rather long time loading the modules. For 2 minutes or so it
> > just displays "GRUB loading..." until the boot menu is shown and I
> can
> > start Ubuntu.
> >
> > The bug has already been reported at Launchpad:
> > https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/420933
> >
> > I tried to find out what causes the problem. I have the following
> disk
> > layout:
> >
> > A "Windows HD" with the following partitions
> > /dev/sda1
> > /dev/sda2
> > /dev/sda3
> > /dev/sda4
> > /dev/sda5
> >
> > A "Ubuntu HD":
> > /dev/sdb2 (Extended Partition)
> > /dev/sdb5 (swap)
> > /dev/sdb6 (small partition, holds some misc data)
> > /dev/sdb7 (Ubuntu 9.10)
> > /dev/sdb8 (Backup)
> >
> > So when I add
> >    set debug="disk"
> > at grub.cfg I can see grub accessing the disk. It cycles through all
> > the partitions, then reads data from sdb7, cycles again through the
> > partitions, reads again from sdb7, and so on...
> >
> > I can't really tell whats causing this, I used the Ubuntu 9.04
> package
> > of grub2 before and that had not this problem. The package dates
> back
> > to to the grub2 version from the 24th July of 2008.
> >
> > Maybe it is possible to do some caching in GRUB2? So for example, if
> >    search -u someuuid
> > is done, the result is saved, and if we do that again, we can lookup
> > in the cache which drive has that uuid? The same for the FS type. If
> > we once did detect ext2 on hd1,7 we should cache that, so we don't
> > need to detect that again.
> >
> > I will try to add more grub_dprintf calls, so that I can better see
> > what is going on.
> >
> > Sincerly
> > Simon W.
> >
> We're aware of this problem and have patch which I'll merge as soon as
> I'm back home

Vladimir any news?
The people on the LP bug now seem to more revert to Legacy instead of
following the advice to boot from the disk where their /boot/grub is on.

-- 
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer and GNU GRUB developer