Hello, Mick. On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 18:21:08 +0100, Mick wrote: > On Monday, 22 October 2018 21:03:54 BST Alan Mackenzie wrote: > > Hello, Gentoo,
> > This isn't a critical problem, but it's a little irritating. > > When my machine boots, it first displays the BIOS invitation to type F2, > > then starts grub. Grub spends about 5 seconds with a blank screen, and > > an underline cursor dotting about randomly in the top left hand area of > > the screen, possibly some 25 x 80 area (whatever that might mean). Only > > then does it display its boot menu. > > My machine is a standard up to date (18 months old) AMD-64 Ryzen machine > > booting from EFI. > > Looking into my /boot/grub/grub.conf, I've got: > > # Menu timeout > > timeout=10 > > : the irritating delay is ~5 seconds, so this can't be due to anything > > dependant on that timeout setting; and > Yes, this is the time GRUB will wait for keyboard input before booting the > default menu entry. > > # If we have a font available, start graphical output. > > if loadfont unifont; then > > echo "Loading unifont" > > # Output resolution for GRUB (eg. 1024x768 or 'auto'). > > gfxmode=auto > GRUB will select some resolution your hardware can accommodate. I guess this > means probing for suitable resolutions and this is likely to take the ~5 > seconds you have noticed. > You could specify something suitable and to check what GRUB can use, run the > command 'videoinfo' in GRUB. Thanks, I've done that. It showed that Grub was running at 1024x768 on driver Efi Gop. So I plugged those values into my grub.cfg and cut down video.lst to include only that one driver. This didn't help - I still got the ~5s delay. > > # Output resolution for Linux (VESAFB only). > > # 'keep' means use the same resolution as GRUB. > > # For other framebuffer drivers, pass a resolution using the > > # video= kernel param. > > gfxpayload=keep > > # Load all video drivers. > > insmod all_video > > # Switch to graphical output. > > terminal_output gfxterm > > fi > > . I'm wondering if my problem has something to do with the 'insmod > > all_video', and then the system is trying out lots of different video > > modes, each with a long timeout, before finally finding the correct one. > > Would, perhaps, a more specific value of gfxmode help? > The all_video refers to the GRUB drivers available for video. Have a look in > /boot/grub/video.lst to see what GRUB has in there, or in /usr/lib64/grub/ > x86_64-efi/video.lst and try the one you prefer GRUB to load. Tried that. Then I tried gfxmode=text,1024x768 , in the off chance it might use the 80x25 character terminal which is baked into the video HW. This didn't work, either. Why does Grub need to initialise a graphical bit map terminal when the 80x25 simply exists? > > Also, as an aside, grub has 878 .c files and a user's info guide > > weighing in at 300 kbytes. It's great that the documentation exists, > > but 300k? This is all just for a boot system. There are 255 loadable > > modules. (For comparison, the Emacs core has just 132 .c files.) I > > can't help feeling that this has got horribly out of hand. > I share your feelings here. I don't use GRUB unless I *have* to multiboot, > which these days is a rarity. > > I just need a program to boot the machine, that's all - I don't really > > care what colours it uses, what fonts it uses, it only needs to read a > > GPT partition table, and boot on utterly standard hardware. I > > appreciate having a menu of different boot options (in my case, this > > just means different kernel versions), but everything else is just > > aesthetic sugar. Too much sugar isn't good for one. > You could use the the kernel EFI stub to boot directly from the EFI > partition, > without the intermediation of a boot manager.[1] The only problem with this > approach is you will need to enter your UEFI boot menu to select another > kernel image to boot with, if the default kernel selection is not your > requirement. Thanks. But it took me several evenings of sweating and cursing to get Grub working ~18 months ago, and I'm loathe to go through the same again to get a different booter working. I think, sooner or later, I'm going to have to reacquaint myself with my installation CD, and do this, though. > [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/EFI_stub_kernel > -- > Regards, > Mick -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).