Re: Long boot times...

[Jeff Ross <openbsd_misc@rossandgram.com>]

No dmesg yet--I'm not sure how to break into a shell at that point of the
boot, if indeed it is even possible.

Interestingly, RHL 6.2 ran fairly snappy on this, but the
installation!  Compile times were dreadful--I let it chug along
overnight to compile OpenSSH.

I don't expect miracles out of this old beast, just a really good
firewall.

Jeff Ross 

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, jedi wrote:

> I've actually installed 2.9 current on an old ibm thinkpad with a 486, 8
> megs of ram and 350meg hd.  ran into the same problem with booting being
> slow, but I haven't seen your issue with it hanging like that.  I was
> actually able to get out of ssh-keygen and move forward faster to make
> sure it booted correctly.
> 
> anyway you can get a dmesg out?
> 
> note: recompiling a kernel on this puppy can take over 24 hours.... :)
> 
> On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Jeff Ross wrote:
> 
> > Now, my next question :-)
> >
> > I'm completely new to OpenBSD.  How long does it take to boot the system
> > on an 8 meg machine?
> >
> > My first boot after this fresh installation was slow, but ssh-keygen was
> > making keys and so on.  The boot took about 30 minutes to get past
> > "preserving editor files", and then finally stalled (I guess) after
> > showing me the date.
> >
> > After a couple of hours of watching the disk light solidly on and
> > listening to the disk thrash, I tried various key combinations to break
> > out of the startup attempt.  Nothing worked, so I cycled the power to try
> > again.
> >
> > The next two attempts didn't have to wait for keygen, but the delays still
> > started with "preserving editor files", stalling, again, after the date
> > line appears.
> >
> > I tried booting with verbose enabled, but apparently after the hardware is
> > scanned the verbose method doesn't apply, so, other than seeing that my
> > hardware is all being found, I didn't gain anything.
> >
> > Is this a lack of ram problem?  Should I try booting from the installation
> > floppy, mounting the wd0 and wd1 to /mnt and /mnt2, and playing with some
> > of the startup options?  I can cut back on the number of virtual
> > consoles--what else can I try?
> >
> > Maybe I'm just not patient enough ;-)
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> >
> > Jeff Ross