[systemd-devel] systemd-vconsole-setup fails very slowly

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 6:13 PM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 21.01.15 19:15, Andy Lutomirski (luto at amacapital.net) wrote:
>
>> Hi all-
>>
>> When running virtme (a simple vm gadget) on Fedora 21, the slowest
>> part of bootup by far appears to be systemd-vconsole-setup:
>>
>> # time /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-vconsole-setup
>> putfont: PIO_FONT trying ...
>> ...................
>> setfont: putfont: 512,8x16:  failed: -1
>> putfont: PIO_FONT: Invalid argument
>> /usr/bin/setfont failed with error code 71.
>
> setfont is not part of systemd, we just invoke it. If that fails, this
> is a problem somewhere between the VM, the kernel and console-tools.
>

Aha -- I missed that systemd-vconsole-setup calls setfont.  I can
trigger the same problem by just typing setfont.  For whatever reason,
my other Fedora 21 computer only has this problem if I type setfont
and not if I run systemd-vconcole-setup.

> My uneducated guess is that your virtual machine boots up with a
> non-graphical console, and the tool thus tries to upload the fonts
> into the good old VGA hw text mode glyph tables, and qemu is very slow
> at that... Or something like that.

setfont is doing this:

nanosleep({0, 250000000}, NULL)         = 0
ioctl(3, PIO_FONT, 0xfbc010)            = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
write(2, ".", 1.)                        = 1
nanosleep({0, 250000000}, NULL)         = 0
ioctl(3, PIO_FONT, 0xfbc010)            = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
write(2, ".", 1.)                        = 1
nanosleep({0, 250000000}, NULL)         = 0
ioctl(3, PIO_FONT, 0xfbc010)            = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
write(2, ".", 1.)                        = 1
nanosleep({0, 250000000}, NULL)         = 0
ioctl(3, PIO_FONT, 0xfbc010)            = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
write(2, ".", 1.)                        = 1
nanosleep({0, 250000000}, NULL)         = 0
ioctl(3, PIO_FONT, 0xfbc010)            = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
write(2, ".", 1.)                        = 1

This thing has only a serial console:

# cat /proc/consoles
ttyS0                -W- (EC   a)    4:64

setfont does this:

        /* we allow ourselves to hang here for ca 5 seconds, xdm may
be playing tricks on us. */
        while ((loop++ < 20) && (i = ioctl(fd, PIO_FONT, buf)))
          {
            if (loop <= 1)
              fprintf(stderr, "putfont: PIO_FONT trying ...\n");
            else
              fprintf(stderr, ".");
            usleep(250000);
          }
        fprintf(stderr, "\n");

Alexey, would it make sense to remove this loop or to add a way to turn it off?

Thanks,
Andy