Progress is being made! The boot process goes something like this. 1) the BIOS runs GRUB from the MBR on the disk, 2) GRUB loads the kernel image in initrd to a ramdisk filesystem 3) the initramfs "init" script is run, does some housekeeping and mounts the root of the real ubuntu file system, 4) the system chroots to the real disk file system and then runs the upstart process (by executing /sbin/init), 5) upstart runs the jobs described by the scripts in /etc/init; one of the jobs it runs is rc which runs the older init.d tasks. Upstart is event driven rather than being a list of sequential tasks so that upstart jobs may execute simultaneously.
If I boot the NB305 with the kernel parameter "init=/bin/bash", the boot process stops before upstart has run. At that point if I run the command "getty -n -l /bin/bash 38400 /dev/tty2 &" it starts another shell running on tty2 and I can jump there with ctrl/alt/F2. I go back to the boot shell and type "exec init" to start upstart. I immediately go to the tty2 shell (ctrl/alt/F2) and type "initctl list". This gives a list of upstart jobs and their status. Only mountall, plymouth and ureadahaed are started/running. All others are stopped/waiting. Mountall is one of the first processes started and is needed to mount the file system as described in /etc/fstab. Plymouth is a graphical splash screen that is just eye candy (I think). I quote from the ubuntu manual for ureadahead "ureadahead (über-readahead) is used during boot to read files in advance of when they are needed such that they are already in the page cache, improving boot performance". So I booted the machine and moved ureadahead.conf and plymouth.conf out of /etc/init (I put them in my home directory for safe keeping). I then rebooted with only "ro"on the command line. The boot time went down to about 2 minutes! The resume from suspend went down to about 3 minutes. Ureadahead makes parameter files that the boot process uses. I didn't know how to get rid of those (more reading required) but I just rebooted the machine a few times and BINGO! Boot times went down to 30 seconds! Not only that... but when I boot with "init=/bin/bash" and check disk performance (before upstart is run) I find the disk is running full speed. Ureadahead parameters appear to have been the cause of the poor disk performance during boot. The bottom line...... UREADAHEAD appears to be the problem with the slow boot times on the Toshiba NB305. Remove it and boot times (eventually) go back to 30 seconds. The bad news.... despite early results showing resume from suspend also was faster... I found that after a few reboots, resume from suspend went back to approximately a 6-7 minute delay! :-( So there is still work to be done. But progress is being made. I may eventually file another bug report under ureadahead. -- wakeup from sleep fails on toshiba nb305 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/508516 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs