[SGVLUG] Time to boot getting longer with Debian

[David Lawyer]

I just installed kernel 2.6.15 on my 11-year-old PC and it takes over
3 min. to boot.  On the same PC it takes less than a minute with kernel
2.2.  2.4 was a little longer and 2.6.12 was about 2 min.  The
boot-time messages pause for too long at various places, and I would
classify most of these pauses as bugs (or possibly gross
inefficiencies in the code).

I could just revert to 2.6.12 but 2.6.15 in Debian has improved in
some ways:  It's complied for a 486 instead of a 386 (2.6.12).  Also
it doesn't load nearly as many unused modules like 2.6.12 did.

So I could track down the delays and submit bug reports for them.
Here's my 1st project: Why does it waste a lot of time probing for
ide0 when I've told it not to do so via the kernel command line (via
lilo)?

Heres from dmesg:
Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=Linux-2.6.15 ro root=1602 plip=timid 
root=/dev/hdc2 ide0=none hda=none hdb=none
...
Probing IDE interface ide0...
Attempting manual resume
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
So I've told it that I have no ide0 (which is hda and hdb so hda=none
and hdb=none should also tell it there's no ide0).  Yet it probes for
it.  Kernel 2.6.12 didn't do this.  What is "Attempting manual
resume"?  Did it get run into trouble probing ide0 and have to recover
from this?  I plan to submit a bug report on this.

Note that I'm not just doing this just for my own curiosity.  I hope
that it will get fixed so that others can use Debian on old PCs.  Yes,
there the Deli distribution of Linux designed for old PC's and it uses
kernel 2.2.  But 2.2 doesn't auto-detect and configure hardware like
2.6 does so I think that 2.6 should work fast on old hardware,
especially if more memory has been added..

			David Lawyer