Re: Bug? Extremely slow loading of initrd if it has more than 4 extents on EXT4

[Joschi Brauchle]

On 05/16/2013 05:38 PM, Felix Miata wrote:
> According to your Novell bug report, you're using an ext4 filesystem.

Yes, you are absolutely correct. For some reason I was writing ext2 
here, which is not correct. So my /boot is EXT4.

> openSUSE's Grub 0.97 is exclusively "maintained" by openSUSE. Upstream
> hasn't maintained Grub Legacy for several years. EXT4 support in
> openSUSE's Grub 0.97 would be entirely openSUSE's responsibility.

Okay, thats good to know. So I will stick with the Novell Bugzilla.

> I have many openSUSE installations, all using Grub Legacy, among them at
> least 10 12.3, and no more than one using EXT4. I just booted the last
> 12.3 I had previously booted, which is on EXT3, but uses the EXT4 kernel
> driver, as most kernels have been doing for at least several releases.
> Filefrag -v reports the currently booted kernel uses 11 extents. I
> suspect few of my others would be very much different, at least WRT use
> of more or less than 4 extents. IOW, I'd expect all are using >4. The
> 11.4 kernel's initrd on the system I'm typing this from uses 100 extents
> on EXT3.

Note that I was talking about the initrd. I'm not sure if you mean the 
same above.

We have not had any problems with openSUSE 11.4, where we have also used 
GRUB legacy along with ext4 /boot partitions. The problem first came up 
with 12.3.

We have more than 70 machines (of ~4 different types, i.e. P4, C2D, i7, 
and so on) here, where basically ALL of them show this slowness when 
extents>4. I have set up a cronjob that recreated the initrd if extents>4.

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