Comment 22 for bug 571707

Okay. Let me first start out retracting pretty much everything I've said so far... there, now let's start anew:

(Using a virtualbox Lucid 32bit guest on 32bit Karmic host)

PROBLEM

When a disk check is performed, the progress stalls somewhere around 70% and will then take a very long time finishing the remaining percent (in my case, around an hour).

TEST CASE:

(sudo aptitude install bootchart)
sudo touch /forcefsck && sudo reboot

WORKAROUNDS

1. Removing "quiet" and "splash" from the kernel boot line

3. When the progress has stalled, switch away from the splash screen using the left arrowkey (presumably any arrowkey works).

* Both these approaches speeds up the boot process to ~1 minute instead.

OBSERVATIONS

The fsck message "somethingsomething non-contiguous somethingsomething" Which I assume indicates the end of the fsck, is printed in the Virtual Terminal (Not-plymouth) at around 70% + ~10-20 seconds.

Disk activity is null from this point on (presumed end of fsck above).

Bootchart crashes if trying to catch the whole boot at once with plymouth (at least for my 1h boot).

This problem seems to occur in both plymouthd and mountall, semi-simultaneously:
If you are in the plymouth screen, plymouthd is the cpu-gobbler, if you switch away from it using the arrow keys, mountall instead takes over the cpu-eating.

BOOTCHARTS
(attached along with complete bootchart log as arand_bootcharts.tar.gz)

0arand_clean
######
Reference clean boot, with plymouth and no fsck.

1arand_switch_to_vt_early
######
In this boot I switched to VT (allowkey out from splash) quite early, as seen in that the shift plymouthd->mountall cpu-hogging is early. mountal takes a little over 100 seconds to finish.

2arand_switch_to_vt_later
######
In this boot I switched to VT later on.
It might be noteworthy that the time that mountall cpu-hogs is approximately the same (100s)

3arand_no_quiet_splash
#####
mountall still hogs the cpu, but for a considerably shorter time, overall boot finishes much faster.

Please do tell if there is anything else useful I could provide.