Fun fact about monitors turning on slowly: did you know Windows has a bluescreen code for that?
The WIN32K_POWER_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT bug check has a value of 0x0000019C. This indicates that Win32k did not turn the monitor on in a timely manner.
That’s right, Windows will panic and throw a bluescreen if your monitors take a little too long to wake up. Had the pleasure of dealing with this suddenly becoming an issue and causing wide bluescreens on wakeup after an update back in mid-2024, on any Surface Dock using DisplayPort with specific Acer monitors.
Woah woah… is there someplace in the event logs where this would show? Does this mean that you cannot run a windows computer headless?
It gets logged in the event viewer, yeah. That’s how I discovered it, on account of the screens not waking up in time to show the actual bluescreen. The users were only reporting that their computers were deleting all their windows when waking up. From their perspective, all they saw was their computer taking a mildly longer time to wake up from deep sleep and then losing their entire session, but what it was actually doing was hard rebooting.
Headless is fine, the bug was specifically triggered when a computer woke up and detected a monitor exists, but the monitor took some unspecified amount of time too long to wake up. It was also fixed at some point, I’m not sure when, but it went on long enough that we swapped dozens of cables because it specifically only happened on the ones using DisplayPort, not HDMI.
Oh shit, this may be the problem I’ve been having with my laptop dock at work
Wow… I feel like I might have ran into this issue dozens of times. So cool the kinds of things I learn here
THIS WAS THE MEME I WAS ACTUALLY LOOKING FOR!! Thanks!
I feel like the boot time is almost entirely uefi ram timing shenanigans these days
I thought arch was all about reducing bloat. Is gentoo better than arch?
Gentoo recompiles everything, so it can do optimisations based on your particular setup Arch can’t.
Obviously arch can be rebuilt pretty easily, gentoo does almost nothing that arch can’t, and rebuilding itself osn’t one of those things. Look up ABS.
Arch is about telling other people what you use. If you use gentoo, you can take way more pride in you installation.
Arch is pourover coffee; Gentoo is those ridiculous Rube Goldberg setups that take 45 minutes to make a single cup. Both are for hipsters.
Ubuntu is that shitty Keurig machine with big plastic pods, but they call them “snaps”.
Does that make Debian standard filter coffee? The coffee everyone can get behind 🫶
Do love a good pourover, excellent analogy.
After restarting the installation for the 5th time, and wasting 5 hours compiling the kernel each time, you should be proud you finally can type on the TTY.
My 13 years old AMD FX-6300 can compile kernel in about half an hour. Sounds like a skill issue.
How long does it take to open the Wikipedia page on hyperbole?
Arch basically happens at a granularity of individual packages. You decide from the ground up which packages you actually need, which is how you end up with a comparatively minimal setup.
But yeah, if the package itself is big, then Arch doesn’t usually deal with that. The Linux kernel comes with drivers for most hardware out of the box, which you can remove, if you know you won’t need that hardware.
And while this can also be done on Arch, it is Gentoo’s thing to do precisely that.To add to this, the big thing you get when using Gentoo is to setup your compiler to use all of the optimizations for your exact CPU/other hardware.
The binaries for arch are built for generic x86-64, while your Gentoo system could bet setup to include AMD-specific optimizations or to remove code paths that you would never used based on your hardware.
The result will be that the binaries will typically be smaller and optimized specifically for your hardware.
The downside is that a system update will take you half a day of churning your CPU on compiling.
What’s this “boot” of which you speak?
Do people really turn their machines off these days?
Yes, I’m not wasting my hardware life and electricity for no gain.
Its arguable that machines last longer staying at temp.
I use my machines enough that having to boot when I need it is just time wasting.
yes
Lol, have my upvote
Yup. My entire PC desk (monitor, PC, 2+1 speakers) draw 7W when the PC is turned off (old speakers draw power when off for some reason). For comparison: My NUC server draws 7W white turned on, doing useful work. This infuriates me, so I got a zigbee power switch and shut the PC desk completely off when I’m not home.
If 7W for nothing pisses me off, you’re damn straight an idle or sleeping PC will too!Every day
Those modules, man… they’re the biggest cause of—dare I say it?—bloat in the kernel.
For the few people here who may not know about it: there’s a utility called modprobe-db that watches what kernel modules get loaded at runtime, and can generate a kernel build config file accordingly. There’s even an ArchWiki article about it. You need to keep it around for a while (e.g. several weeks or months) so it can get a proper sample of the modules you use; that way, your kernel can have all the modules you need (ask me how I know). If you do it right, however, you can slim down your compile time significantly.
I’ll ask! How do you know? Lol
All jokes aside, I think this might really help me with a side project I’ve been working on. Ive been trying to get full disk encryption working on a NanoPi R6S running NixOS. The issue that im having is that im not sure exactly what modules I need in the initrd. When I boot, there is no output on the display after systemd-boot shows.
The manufacturer puts out a version of Ubuntu thats works flawlessly so I know its possible. But I’ll pass on the snaps and id rather not use uboot. System is working with edk2 and nixos.
Long story short, will this software allow me to figure out what is running in the manufacturer’s kernel and port it over?
How do you know?
Zoom not having working audio—discovered right before a job interview 💀
But yeah, I bet it would work! Just make sure you run modprobe-db with the manufacturer’s kernel long enough to run all the software you’ll actually use, so it can record the modules you need.
Of course, make sure you read up on it with that ArchWiki article and take a look at the source code to be sure (it’s basically a simple shell script), but from what I understand it should do what you need.
Well if it was for a tech job im sure you could’ve shown off some troubleshooting skills haha
And the ArchWiki link is perfect. Ill read up on that and ensure I’m using it correctly. Thank you very much for the pointer kind stranger! :)
True, true haha
Oh good! Happy I could help. :)
Does that mean you need to fiddle with modules, because you plug in a new USB-device you haven’t used before?
Yeah, if you use a kernel you built off modprobe-db’s config output, but the build config was generated before you ever used that USB device, then yeah, your kernel wouldn’t have the right modules for it (if the device required some unique kernel modules). modprobe-db will only tell you what it’s seen you use.
Gentoo is GOAT. I am also glad that Arch exists though. Both have excellent wikis, good knowledgeable communities, lots of configuration options. In terms of pure speed, it is hard to beat a build it all from source as per your own custom USE flags setup like in Gentoo.
Speaking as a Gentoo user here: Gentoo is more capable, but Arch has better documentation.
Folk w/o FDE …
What?
Full disk encryption
(I can’t beat monitor powering up.)
Slowing you down. Ah, same. I may have used higher than default iterations 😅
Get a ardunio and wire up a bop-it so you can unlock your computer faster.
Maybe dropbear and unlock really fast from another device where the monitor is already on?
I’ll just get one of those closed sauce humanoid robots dependent on AI megacorps to input the pass at superspeed.
Or just tell it to keep the monitor turned off & only power it on once desktop shows up.
The future is near!!
Maybe if you used TPM key storage to automate the unlock. But ofc that reduces security
And you can’t forget the BIOS password
Keep going. Kevin can get smaller, leaner, faster and hopefully has apparmor or selinux already.
this reminds me i should update my kernel
Statements of the utterly deranged
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My laptop boots much faster than my desktop PC (both running Fedora 43) despite my desktop PC being much faster.
Does your desktop have more RAM, or faster RAM? If so, the training step can take much longer. In your desktop’s BIOS look for a setting called “Memory Context Restore” and turn it on. That can dramatically speed up boot times.
That setting is no joke, I was pissed I didn’t enable it sooner
My machine went from 45+ seconds to 13 for boot
Yes to both. I’ll take a look for that setting, thanks!
Oh wow that’s so much better!
Even with turning that on, it seems that many newish motherboards will still sit and putz around for quite some time before finally handing things off to the OS. My guess is there’s little push for speedy boot times (I haven’t really seen this as something that shows up in reviews), so the hardware manufacturers don’t really bother with optimizing for it.
