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

[Felix Miata]

On 2013-05-16 17:48 (GMT+0200) Joschi Brauchle composed:

> Felix Miata wrote:

> > 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.

Not enough sleep last night. The 11.4 shows 27 extents for /boot/initrd. The 
12.3 shows 11 extents for /boot/initrd, same number as /boot/vmlinuz.

> 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.

Are there any that do not show the problem? If so, how does/do it/they differ 
in configuration?

To get traction in your bug report maybe you need to set a system up to boot 
from EXT2 or EXT3 to see if the problem goes away for you. Maybe 
opensuse-kernel would be a better forum for discussion of this particular 
problem than opensuse-factory, especially now that Factory is 13.1 - unless 
maybe you install 13.1 on one and it does the same.
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