[Bug 480159] Re: grub console is ridiculously slow

[Christopher Chavez]

I'm experiencing this with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 500/600 AGP (if I
remember correctly), and ONLY on the DVI port--both when using a DVI
monitor or a DVI to VGA adapter. Using grub2-2.02~beta2-15 on Ubuntu
MATE 14.10 which by default uses a graphical theme (grub2-themes-ubuntu-
mate), so I don't know if I'm experiencing a better or worse degree of
slowness.

Rather than using the monitor's 1280x1024 resolution as do Linux and
grub2 on other machines, it seems to fallback to 640x480 and very few
colors, and unless I pass a kernel argument (e.g. vga=795) the console
output is unreadable white "blocks".  The drawing speed seems slightly
faster on one of the machines--which I assume is due to a faster FSB
(533MT/s vs 400MT/s, since they both use AGP 4x and the one that draws
slower has a faster CPU clock: 2.9GHz vs 2.4GHz).

If I use GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024 in /etc/default/grub, it behaves much
faster and in full color, just like when using the VGA port.

Fast forward to 2014, and I can find various reports of similar bugs but
for quite a variety of hardware, and some of which have been resolved. I
should be able to collect the output of vbeinfo if desired.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/480159

Title:
  grub console is ridiculously slow

Status in grub2 package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: grub2

  Hello!

  I've tried setting GRUB_GFXMODE=1920x1200 in /etc/default/grub, as
  this is the native resolution of my screen.

  This works, in the sense that the GRUB menu is displayed in that
  resolution. However, the display is really, _really_ slow. I can see
  the borders being drawn on the screen (it takes about a second). And
  scrolling is unusable: if I use the GRUB console enough to fill the
  screen, it takes about six second to scroll to each next line. This is
  on an nVidia GeForce 9600 GT.

  Note that if I set the same resolution for the Linux text console
  (which works, through vesafb as far as I can tell), scrolling is still
  slower than text mode, but still usable (I'd say about a second or
  less to scroll an _entire_ screen, not six seconds _per_line_ as GRUB
  does).

  (I've seen this reported as a side note in other bugs, but I can't
  find a duplicate bug on this problem only.)

  ProblemType: Bug
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Tue Nov 10 18:40:17 2009
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
  Package: grub-pc 1.97~beta4-1ubuntu4
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-15.49-generic
  SourcePackage: grub2
  Uname: Linux 2.6.31-15-generic x86_64
  XsessionErrors:
   (gnome-settings-daemon:2166): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
   (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:2288): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
   (nautilus:2258): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed
   (gnome-panel:2257): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -10 and height 25
   (gnome-panel:2257): Gdk-WARNING **: /build/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.18.3/gdk/x11/gdkdrawable-x11.c:952 drawable is not a pixmap or window

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