this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Apparently the reason my computer has been taking 2 minutes to boot was a faulty network mount

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[–] [email protected] 165 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm pretty sure the main system startup bottleneck is me typing the disk encryption passphrase.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Combine that with the 20-30 seconds my system takes to do bios memory training on the DDR5 ram and we’re practically back to the “go make some coffee while the system boots up” days 🤦

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

we need open source firmware

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If only Coreboot supported more devices…

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Glad I haven't built a modern chipset PC yet, didn't realize it was this bad.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I can relate to this hahaha

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

My system bottleneck is the damn Bios Post

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I wish to replace it with a yubikey, but I don't even know if it's supported.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It is supported by systemd to use FIDO2 + pin to decrypt luks partitions with many security keys, including Yubikeys. I use it every day on my laptop.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is, I have it set up on my laptop. It's a bit finicky in how it works and it's not easy to setup, but it is possible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does it work by emulating the keyboard and typing in the password? Or by the encrypted protocol that works using the on device secret?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You can't even use a fucking fingerprint scanner while being in the system, that package is borked for months and nobody seem to care to solve it.

I think using Yubikey at boot time is quite out of reach

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Fucking true. Does anyone know why this is so slow?

[–] [email protected] 113 points 1 year ago (3 children)

You can use systemd-analyze blame if you want raw numbers:

This command prints a list of all running units, ordered by the time they took to initialize. This information may be used to optimize boot-up times.

Good way to see if your systemd also waits 2 minutes for a network connection which already exists but it can't see it because systemd doesn't do the networking (lxc containers on proxmox in my case) lol.

Also see systemd-analyze.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Also systemd-analyze critical-chain

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

systemd also waits 2 minutes for a network connection which already exists but it can’t see it because systemd doesn’t do the networking

Any way to speed this up? On my system in every boot it waits for network for 30s.

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Systemd has so many neat and useful tools that they never tell anyone about :(

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Just like Ceph :(

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (1 children)

systemd-analyze plot > plot.svg

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Honestly I laughed when it just spit an SVG in text at me. I was wholly expecting a GUI to appear.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Systemd can generate SVGs? Damn thats "bloat" but also unexpectedly fancy

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SVGs are just fancy text files after all

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you go far enough, everything is.

But SVGs are one of the few image types that can be human readable and editable

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

If you go far enough, everything is.

No, SVG are text files, it's XML. You can write an SVG file representing a square using only a text editor relatively easily.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

No, not really. Most image formats produce completely unreadable jumbo only meant to be parsed with clever maths.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a way to do this for shutdown? It'd be great to debug shutdown hangs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

No, there currently isn’t

And it's not as easy to add actually. Note that systemd only keeps units loaded as long as they are referenced by something else that is loaded, are running, have failed, or have a job queued. That means if a service is terminated at shutdown there's a very good chance it is GC'ed away pretty quickly. Now, while systemd keeps timestamping info around for services that tell us how long a service was running, took to start or took to shut down all that info is lost the instant the unit is GC'ed away...

Source

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TIL: Systemd is great and despite its usefulness, it is often overlooked due to controversy and the current state of things when it comes to software development. https://tadeubento.com/2023/systemd-hidden-gems-for-a-better-linux/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for the article, I've already spotted a few utilities that can come in useful. I've heard a lot of criticism about systemd too, but never really actively used it myself until a few weeks ago. I actually quite like it from what I've seen so far.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

I wrote a long-ish comment in another thread explaining why lots of people don’t like systemd.

Stuff like this is why people do like systemd.

The massive, un unixy and complex tools allow for very powerful and somewhat knowledge agnostic approaches to all sorts of problems.

One of the nicest things about systemds toolset is that it allows a person who relies on finding the problem and googling it to resolve thing much faster than their alternative, learn what’s going on and figure it out.

I don’t mean that as a pejorative, plenty of computer work is maintenance as opposed to engineering and there’s nothing wrong with that.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

My bottleneck at boot is my damn Bios... I am so hyped about flashing Heads on my Thinkpad T430.

Even the old legacy Lenovo bioses where very fast at startup. The UEFI (with extremely nice secure-boot settings too) of an AMD Acer starts up in like 2 seconds. My old intel Thinkpad T430 needs like 4 seconds.

And then my Lenovo T495 bullshit UEFI comes. No secure boot configuration at all, I have no idea how to boot from USB sticks, and this thing needs nearly 10 seconds to boot! Linux compared, a full Desktop OS, needs 3 seconds to show SDDM (after the LUKS dialog)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I adore my T530. I could kill a moose with it if it ever stops working. Literally dug it out of a dumpster and saw the i7 sticker and almost shit myself. Honestly I've had it for years and never even looked at the bios cuz with an SSD even with encryption enabled on the disk it booted in 30 sec.

Until I built my latest rig I was doing ai image generation on it with 8gigs of ram.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If you have a T530, there is coreboot for it! Dont know if 1vyra.in works, check it.

Its not the question, if it works, but how it works! Its trustworthy and not extremely outdated proprietary garbage. Actually extremely important to update

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

The good ol' Gnome on Wayland on SystemD on GNU on Linux trick

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

the only "bottleneck" i currently have is plymouth-quit-wait.service, which takes 3.9 seconds. i can live with that

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I know you put bottleneck is quotes but just to explain... apparently this service is simply the splash screen that waits on a ready environment. It doesn't actually delay anything.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

abrtd.service, 34 seconds..

thanks fedora, very cool

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

It tells me that my system boots in 7 seconds. That's pretty cool, considering that it's installed on a plain old sata SSD.

POST, however...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I think you a word in your title.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Dang had no idea this was a thing, but this looks very useful! I've been meaning to troubleshoot slow startup on one of my servers.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

this is interesting! if i had a two minute boot time, I'd look for ways to figure out what's going on.

i remember init messages used to be printed to the console, but nowadays all i get is Manjaro branding. anyone know how to get my console messages back from systemd?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Damn I really needed systemd analyzer to debug stuff! Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Aha! Reminds me of the good old days when I tried to minimize boot up time on my puny Ivy Bridge i5 laptop. Those days were fun!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How many times a day you guys reboot? 236? Mine takes like 17 seconds... Every week or so...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Laptop gang

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Anyone know about a Windows equivalent for my work laptop?

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