On Sat 18 Dec 2021 at 11:08:37 (-0500), Greg Wooledge wrote: > Today I rebooted my machine for the first time in quite a while, after > the kernel update that was released along with Debian 11.2.
Mine's a new installation. I've run buster from an external drive for a while, but have recently installed bullseye on its SSD. > When it reached the GRUB screen, I pressed Enter, and nothing happened > as far as I could see. I was initially worried that it had stopped > seeing my USB keyboard (a thing that I've experienced with GRUB and > certain USB slots on certain machines in the past). This keyboard > plugged into this same USB slot had worked in previous versions of GRUB > on this machine, though. Mine's a laptop: HP Spectre x360 Convertable 15-bl012dx. > The next thing I observed was that after 5 seconds, it still hadn't > booted, nor had the coundown ("will automatically boot in 5s" or whatever) > advanced. It appeared to be hung. Snap. It's happened maybe three or four times (one gets no record, of course.) > I waited a bit longer, and the 5s changed to 4s. It just took a really > long time (like 15+ seconds for each second on the timer). I'm afraid I just assumed it was permanently hung when Enter did nothing, so I just force-powered off and started over. > Eventually, after a minute or two, the system booted. Everything is > working normally now, post-GRUB. > > Has anyone experienced this, or does anyone have ideas about how to > prevent it happening again? I am not interested in trial and error > for this, because it's far too annoying and disruptive. But if there > are well-known ideas about things I could try (e.g. "grub 2.04 is known > to have bugs on Intel motherboards, revert to 2.03") then I'm game. I haven't really looked. (I've been sort of off the grid over Christmas.) > I Googled it, and the only hits I found were for people reporting slow > interactivity with GRUB on high-resolution displays. I don't think my > monitor is high resolution, and this has NEVER been a problem on ANY > previous boot, with this same computer and monitor. I have not changed > any hardware. Only software versions. (Of course, I can't rule out > hardware going bad.) This laptop does have a very high resolution: 3840x2160, which means using a magnifying glass. I started by typing setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Lat15-TerminusBold32x16.psf.gz blind, then sticking Xscale="0.5" Yscale="0.5" in .xsession, but lastly, after editing the Grub screen to add video=960x540 and finding that that fixed everything, I just added GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="video=960x540" to /etc/default/grub, and removed the scaling. When it first stalled, I had just installed bullseye, and I only had /boot/efi/EFI/debian, so I booted the installer's rescue, and reinstalled Grub with the removable device path (whatever that means), which wrote /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT. However, stalling has reoccurred just a couple of times since then. I just assumed the EFI might be slightly flaky. The laptop has a few faults (which is why I've inherited it), like poor socketry all round (HDMI, USB3, USB-C x 2), non-functional trackpad "buttons", and somewhat unreliable keys. Cheers, David.