Initrd takes 46 seconds during boot

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1

Hello,

I was trying out Fedora 42 Cinnamon edition today. I installed it on a separate SSD that I didnt use. I plugged it into my Windows 10 PC. The Windows 10 drive is encrypted with Veracrypt and gets unencrypted when I boot via the veracrypt bootloader, the other two drives are unencrypted.

Now booting up takes a long time and systemd-analyze says initrd takes 46 seconds, so I went to talk to ChatGPT and it said, that the initrd detects the drive tries to mount it and fails, thus waiting for a timeout. That would fit because the other two drives (unencrypted) appear in the file manager.

Now, my question is firstly, is that true? And secondly if yes how do I fix that?

If the above is true, then I know this problem would likely disappear if I got rid of Windows and just installed Fedora alone, but I am not at that point yet, I just want to try it out for a bit. Preferably without an eternal boot time :smiley:

2

You can try Fedora Workstation in WSL2 and avoid the need to reboot to switch between Windows and Linux.

3

Can you post the output of systemd-analyze for us to comment on?

4

But then one is running with the memory overhead and the spyware of Windows in the background!

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6

You can run systemd-analyze critical-chain to see the critical path of units during boot along with some timing information, or systemd-analyze blame to see detailed activation time of running units. This might give you some more insight into what is going on.

7

Sorry I should have been more helpful about the output I was looking for
Please run these commands:

systemd-analyze critical-chain
systemd-analyze blame

In particular critical-chain often points to the reason for the delay.

Please avoid posting screen shots of text. Post the text as pre-formatter text using the </> button.

8

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To maximize the number of people who this topic, save the text to a USB key or other storage shareable with the system you use for this forum, then post as pre-formatted text (use the </> button from the top line of the text entry panel).

9

For a reference (and if someone wants something fun to aim for :stuck_out_tongue:):

Startup finished in 4.464s (firmware) + 526ms (loader) + 329ms (kernel) + 1.595s (initrd) + 2.479s (userspace) = 9.394s 
graphical.target reached after 2.479s in userspace.

initrd usually did 2s worst-case.

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10

Bah - I have 20+ seconds on firmware before anything at all gets moving.

If I enable fastboot in the bios it shaves a few seconds off but the USB keyboard doesn’t wake up until AFTER grub, so if I do want to boot an alternative kernel, I don’t get a chance to select it.

11

Can you make a Docs page for that please?

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12

I got those boot times on openSUSE Tumbleweed. On F43 beta userspace was 12 seconds (10s higher than oS) but I couldn’t quite figure out why (NetworkManager wait was 5s/top on blame F43 but I didn’t check if oS had that).

  • 4s firmware is average on my laptop if nothing is enabled that slows that down (I think Legacy OpROM adds a few secs)
  • loader mainly depends on GRUB/bootloader timeout; I set it to 0 for the flex :stuck_out_tongue: but usually set 1-2 sec
  • Not sure what affects kernel but iirc it was about the same oS and F43 Beta
  • initrd I have dracut.conf tweaks:
sudo -e '/etc/dracut.conf.d/99-custom.conf' && sudo dracut --force --regenerate-all

compress="cat"
do_strip="yes"
aggressive_strip="yes"
hostonly="yes"
hostonly_mode="strict"
early_microcode="no"

early_microcode reduced the generated initrd size a bit; my BIOS firmware is up-to-date with it.

I disable tuned and have x86_energy_perf_policy set performance governor via udev rule (notes); it apples about 2s in dmesg/early-boot and might speed up the rest of the boot process.

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