Bug#508834: grub-probe is painfully slow to execute due to excessive ioctl(BLKFLSBUF)

[Yuri D'Elia]

Package: grub-pc
Version: 1.97+20091210-1
Severity: normal

I also experience that problem, and it seems related to Xorg somehow
(I'm using the xorg-intel driver if that matters).

Grub's grub-probe is taking 120-190 seconds for me when I run it with Xorg
active, and generally less than 60 seconds if I turn Xorg off. It's still
painfully slow in my opinion (why should it take more than 1 second at all?),
but Xorg *does* makes it slower. Whyle grub-probe is running, Xorg cpu rises
up to 100%.

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND          
15707 root      25   5 13092 6924  660 R   95  0.2   1:41.55 grub-probe        
 2731 root      20   0  379m  13m 4944 S   52  0.3   9:21.83 Xorg              

Thanks.

-- Package-specific info:

*********************** BEGIN /proc/mounts
/dev/disk/by-uuid/350fd0a1-e1c7-4719-be0c-27f9daa56966 / xfs rw,nodev,relatime,attr2,nobarrier,noquota 0 0
/dev/sda1 /boot ext3 rw,nodev,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0
*********************** END /proc/mounts

*********************** BEGIN /boot/grub/device.map
(hd0)	/dev/sda
*********************** END /boot/grub/device.map

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (900, 'unstable'), (800, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.31-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages grub-pc depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.28     Debian configuration management sy
pn  grub-common                   <none>     (no description available)
ii  libc6                         2.10.2-2   GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  ucf                           3.0025     Update Configuration File: preserv

grub-pc recommends no packages.

Versions of packages grub-pc suggests:
pn  desktop-base                  <none>     (no description available)

-- debconf information:
  grub2/kfreebsd_cmdline:
* grub2/linux_cmdline: selinux=0
* grub-pc/chainload_from_menu.lst: true
  grub-pc/kopt_extracted: true
* grub-pc/install_devices: /dev/sda
  grub-pc/postrm_purge_boot_grub: false
  grub2/kfreebsd_cmdline_default: quiet
* grub2/linux_cmdline_default: quiet