Slow boot

[Tony Nelson]

It irritates me that during boot there is about 100 seconds where nothing
happens.  Looking at the log, and also when booting without "quiet", I see
that the time is spent repeatedly probing my IDE bus for devices that
aren't there.  I have an ASUS MB with 2 IDE controllers, with the HD on the
faster Promise controller rather than the VIA one, so to Linux the HD is
hde, hdc is the CD, and  hda, hdb and hdd are unused.  Linux tries hard to
find hda and hdb, but doesn't mind that hdd doesn't exist (nor for that
matter, do hdf, hdg, and hdh).  The unused IDE ports in the BIOS are
disabled, but that doesn't make any difference.  grub.conf has a comment
saying boot=/dev/hde3, which is correct, and actually refers to it as
(hd0,2), so I assume that grub.conf is correct and tells the right things
to Linux.

Is there a way to tell Linux not to try so hard to find hda and hdb, or to
skip them?


Details follow:

Kernel 2.6.11-1.27_FC3
(also  2.6.11-1.14_FC3)


IDE part of Kernel Startup log:

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
VP_IDE: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:04.1
VP_IDE: chipset revision 6
VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
VP_IDE: VIA vt82c686b (rev 40) IDE UDMA100 controller on pci0000:00:04.1
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xb800-0xb807, BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0xb808-0xb80f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: IRQ probe failed (0xfcfa)
hda: IRQ probe failed (0xfcfa)
hda: no response (status = 0x0a), resetting drive
hda: IRQ probe failed (0xfcfa)
hda: no response (status = 0x0a)
hdb: IRQ probe failed (0xfcfa)
hdb: IRQ probe failed (0xfcfa)
hdb: no response (status = 0x0a), resetting drive
hdb: IRQ probe failed (0xfcfa)
hdb: no response (status = 0x0a)
Probing IDE interface ide1...
hdc: _NEC NR-7700A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
PDC20265: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:11.0
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] enabled at IRQ 9
PCI: setting IRQ 9 as level-triggered
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:11.0[A] -> GSI 9 (level, low) -> IRQ 9
PDC20265: chipset revision 2
PDC20265: 100% native mode on irq 9
PDC20265: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary PCI Mode Secondary PCI Mode.
    ide2: BM-DMA at 0x7800-0x7807, BIOS settings: hde:DMA, hdf:pio
    ide3: BM-DMA at 0x7808-0x780f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio
Probing IDE interface ide2...
hde: WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0, ATA DISK drive
ide2 at 0x9000-0x9007,0x8802 on irq 9
Probing IDE interface ide3...
Probing IDE interface ide0...
ide0: Wait for ready failed before probe !
hda: IRQ probe failed (0x7cfa)
hda: IRQ probe failed (0x7cfa)
hda: no response (status = 0x0a), resetting drive
hda: IRQ probe failed (0x7cfa)
hda: no response (status = 0x0a)
hdb: IRQ probe failed (0x7cfa)
hdb: IRQ probe failed (0x7cfa)
hdb: no response (status = 0x0a), resetting drive
hdb: IRQ probe failed (0x7cfa)
hdb: no response (status = 0x0a)
Probing IDE interface ide3...
hde: max request size: 128KiB
hde: Host Protected Area detected.
	current capacity is 234375000 sectors (120000 MB)
	native  capacity is 234441648 sectors (120034 MB)
hde: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hde: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide: failed opcode was: 0x37
hde: 234375000 sectors (120000 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(100)
hde: cache flushes not supported
 hde: hde1 hde2 < hde5 hde6 > hde3 hde4
hdc: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20


mtab & rdev:

[root at localhost ~]# cat /etc/mtab
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 / ext3 rw 0 0
none /proc proc rw 0 0
none /sys sysfs rw 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0
/dev/hde3 /boot ext3 rw 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw 0 0
sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw 0 0
[root at localhost ~]# rdev
/dev/dm-0 /
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'                       <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
      '                              <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>