Re: grub freezes at "grub loading."

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 27, 2013, at 2:08 PM, Jad <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 9:43 PM, Chris Murphy <address@hidden> wrote:
>> It's not advised to combine CSM-BIOS and SSDs, it significantly limits their 
>> performance. You'd need to boot a live CD in legacy and EFI modes, and 
>> compare dmesg to see the consequences of either choice on your particular 
>> hardware. But so far I've yet to see a CSM not put AHCI in IDE mode, rather 
>> than fully native AHCI mode. And that limits performance. Further, ACPI is 
>> typically limited as well, that will inhibit battery life on a laptop.
> 
> I understand completely, but I have to make a choice between the SSD's
> performance and my graphics card, and in this particular instance, I
> would rather loose the SSD's performance rather than not being able to
> use my NVIDIA.

So you're having nouveau problems when booting in EFI mode? Welcome to the 
club. I've found kernel 3.6.10 and 3.6.11 to work very well, and all 3.7 
kernels are OK, some boot time corruption but GNOME/KDE are fine once they 
load. 3.8 intermittently, maybe 1/10 times, implodes with nouveau. And 3.9 
there's been a regression such that I have a black screen and need to use 
nomodeset. Anyway, point is, it's worth trying other kernels.


> Totally agreed. The whole UEFI implementation anyway feels like a
> hastily patched together thing, if not on paper, at least in its
> current implementation (afaic).

It's quite solid on paper as a specification. The problem is the 
implementations are immense pieces of code with who knows how many bugs. It's 
like an OS in its own right, not merely a firmware. And the best testing is 
practical testing, so they have no real choice but to subject their users to 
these bugs.


> While we get somewhere stable, we
> should have some sort of knowledge base for people like me, noobs or
> semi-techies, who need to understand how to boot their OS.

And this is where I depart from typical OSS mentality, I think good software is 
open for developers and people who want to learn; but it's pretty and hides 
things from mortal users who have work to do, not f around with a g.d. computer 
all week long just to get it to work. If people who understand how this stuff 
works design and implement correctly, you shouldn't need to understand how to 
boot a computer. It should just work.

But you're on the bleeding edge with a UEFI computer, and depending on nouveau 
drivers. 


Chris Murphy