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

[Adam Majer]

Package: grub-common
Version: 1.97~beta3-1
Severity: wishlist
File: /usr/sbin/grub-probe

It is not only slow, it is *painfully* slow.

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
10708 root      20   0  4096  844  552 R   99  0.0   0:05.27
grub-probe         


Installing new version of config file /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ...
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found Debian background: moreblue-orbit-grub.png
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30-1-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.30-1-amd64
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found Windows Vista (loader) on /dev/sda1
Found Debian GNU/Linux (lenny/sid) on /dev/sdc3
done


And no, it is not the disk driver, it is grub-probe that is using 100%
CPU time. This is on AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+.

And not only it is slow, it run twice when installing
packages. grub_probe is by far the slowest part of installing 600MB of
packages.

- Adam


-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (50, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages grub-common depends on:
ii  base-files             5.0.0             Debian base system miscellaneous f
ii  libc6                  2.9-27            GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libfreetype6           2.3.9-5           FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libncurses5            5.7+20090803-2    shared libraries for terminal hand
ii  zlib1g                 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-15 compression library - runtime

Versions of packages grub-common recommends:
pn  os-prober                     <none>     (no description available)

Versions of packages grub-common suggests:
ii  multiboot-doc                 0.97-58    The Multiboot specification

-- no debconf information