Slow load on an IBM X31

[groovygroundhog]

This has been an annoyance that's been plaguing me for some time. When I boot my laptop (IBM X31) with Gentoo, it takes about 20 seconds to load the kernel. This isn't a problem on my Latitude C800. Any ideas on what's going on?

[spencerf]

I would check to make sure that you only have necessary stuff enabled in your kernel. For instance you don't need drivers for x NIC if you have y. Simple things like this can slow you down.

Without more specific 'error' messages or whatever its tough to tell. I have a T22 and its lightning fast so its not your computer.

[groovygroundhog]

My kernel is very light weight but thanks for the suggestion. Is there anywhere you'd recommend looking for errors? Also, could there be an option I could set in Lilo?

[spencerf]

maybe one suggestion would be to switch to grub. that is what i use it is easy and fast. Never used lilo though so I don't know about configuring that.

[variant]

Perhaps you are using genkernel and therefore initrd. if you are using initrd the boot time will be increased greatly. manualy recompile your kernel and remove the initrd

[groovygroundhog]

I'm nervous about switching to grub because I've had bad experiences. Also, this is my one windows computer and I can't risk losing the installation. I'm not running using a ramdisk nor did I use genkernel. It just takes forever to load the thing at boot time. I suppose I'll go back through my kernel and see if there's any junk I don't need in there. The filesystem on my boot partition is EXT3 if that matters. Could there be some integrity check it's doing on the kernel that I can override?

[spencerf]

yeah that probably has something to do with it. Usually. as far as I know, boot partitions are ext2 because it does not have journaling. ext3 isn't bad for your boot but journaling and checking will slow things down.

[groovygroundhog]

Can you go back from ext3 to ext2?