[SOLVED] How to turn off ext4lazyinit?

Carlosk465 · n00b Joined: 29 May 2022 Posts: 69

I have searched a lot but I did not find the solution, I need to turn off ext4lazyinit so that the system starts faster, when plasma starts it stays stuck for about 3 seconds.

I have read that I need to force it to terminate but this does not work, it keeps starting at the beginning.

I don't like this lazy behavior, how can I disable it? I guess this is the same culprit why the progress bar when copying files doesn't work.

Any file system with which I can format my drive that works without needing "ext4lazyinit" (evidently this is only for ext4 but I suppose other formats will have their equivalent)?

By the way, I have a 2Tb HDD and about 25Gb free, just for data, this is the problematic HDD (I don't even have /home on this disk and it still makes the system slow when starting kde plasma.), because if I remove it it works fine, I have another 120 Gb SSD for the system.
_________________
Sorry for my way of writing, I try to ensure that the translator translates correctly and does not change the words.

pietinger · Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2024 4:14 pm Post subject:

Does this help ?
https://fedetft.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/on-ext4-and-forcing-the-completion-of-lazy-initialization/
_________________
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Pietinger

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21650

According to man mke2fs, you can set lazy_itable_init=0 to instruct that the inode table be initialized immediately. This will make the mkfs slower.

Alternatively, let the kernel finish initializing the inode table. This is a one-time operation. Once finished, it will not need to be done again.

Carlosk465 · n00b Joined: 29 May 2022 Posts: 69

pietinger · Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2024 4:56 pm Post subject:

Have you done this ?

mount -o init_itable=0 <partition> <mountpoint>
_________________
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Pietinger

Carlosk465 · n00b Joined: 29 May 2022 Posts: 69

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21650

Yes, it is. How did you determine that inode creation is not finished?

Carlosk465 · n00b Joined: 29 May 2022 Posts: 69

Because I have high disk activity only at power on, then it goes down and the process disappears from the list, I have also checked the file system, I have seen the SMART data. and I can't think of anything else it could be.
_________________
Sorry for my way of writing, I try to ensure that the translator translates correctly and does not change the words.

Adarion · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Aug 2005 Posts: 78

(my 2 cents:)
as far as I know (and always do) during FS creation

# mkfs.ext4 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0 -other-options /dev/...

Other than that, as people wrote, it should be a one time process, so after mounting the FS it will churn on the HDD for a while and then (hopefully) be finished.
Not sure if it can be done also via tune2fs or something.

PS: To speed up things there can also be many other issues and bottlenecks.
setting "noatime" in the fstab mount options can speed up things a little (and saves write cycles on SSDs). One can optimize things during fsck and back in the days of HDDs there was also e4rat (which is not improving things on flash media, though).
But there could also be other things slowing down KDE upbringing.
_________________
stop tcpa, swpatents, corrupt politicians and other scary stuff

tholin · Apprentice Joined: 04 Oct 2008 Posts: 203

the ext4lazyinit kernel thread is used for two things:
* do lazy init of ext4 inoded after mkfs.
* prefetch block bitmaps on every mount so that the block allocator can make better decisions early on.

You are probably seeing the prefetch. This feature was turn on by default in kernel v5.13. If you don't like it you could use the ext4 mount option "no_prefetch_block_bitmaps".

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/21175ca434c5d49509b73cf473618b01b0b85437

Carlosk465 · n00b Joined: 29 May 2022 Posts: 69