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SubjectRe: Slow booting
On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, David Lang wrote:

> there is a problem and it is related to the speed of the CPU
> and/or the type of floppy controller in the system (I don't know
> which). If you boot from a floppy on a <200 MHz system it boots
> fine, an a >300 MHz system it can take 5-10 min to read the
> image off of the floppy before it starts to compress it.
>
> I have seen this while using the same floppy on systems ranging
> from 486/25 to PIII/550 but not on all systems (toshiba laptops
> seem to be reasonably fast but many desktops dead slow) I have
> seen this on a wide variaty of systems from dell, compaq,
> toshiba, and a variaty of clones using different motherboards) I
> origionally put it down to a new bug in lilo (thinking it was
> hitting every system) until I recently updated some old P-75 and
> 486 systems to run linux and noticed how fast they booted in
> comparison.
>
> it acts as if the system is only reading a singly sector(or
> block) per revolution of the floppy on the fast systems, but on
> the slow systems it is able to read the whole thing quickly.
>
> both fast and slow systems have the same performance when
> accessing the floppy at all times other then the lilo boot
> process (and for that matter it is only when reading the boot
> image, reading the root filesystem from floppy is fast)

This sounds like the "compact" option has been left out of lilo.conf
as, unless I'm mistaken, that's exactly what LILO does when it's
missed out. You may wish to try with that included and report what
difference it makes, if any.

Best wishes from Riley.

* Copyright (C) 1999, Memory Alpha Systems.
* All rights and wrongs reserved.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
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| else has already done so and is just about to release their patch. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
* http://www.memalpha.cx/Linux/Kernel/


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