Calculating module deps slow with 2.6 on old hardware

[tHeoo]

Hardware: Mobile Pentium MMX, 128 mb memory, Dell Latitude CP 233ST. Kernel is by now 2.6.5-mm1. I had others. Same problems as described below. Scheduler is either as or cfq. No difference.

I used to have a 2.4 kernel on this box (my wife's) but after upgrading something, I had problems with pcmcia. I've tried several 2.6 kernels. These work with pcmcia, but they are slower on startup. I don't think they are particularly slower in general, and sometimes perhaps even faster, but slower on:

- calculating module dependencies (really slow, say 10 times slower than with 2.4)
- calculating service dependencies (less slow)
- setting console font (really slow, 10x)

I've removed the console font setting with rc-update del consolefont (rc.conf). AFter looking at the /etc/init.d/modules script, it seems that the evil is in /sbin/modules-update, which indeed, if called manually after startup, takes about the same time to complete. I've upgraded module-init-tools from 0.9.15 to 3.0. Doesn't help.

- First question: why is modules-update necessary?
- Second question: any clues why it is so much slower on 2.6 than on 2.4?
- Third question: any clues why the font setting is so much slower?

This is interesting anyway, because on my own box (Athlon XP 2000, 512 mb, 2.6.5-gentoo-r1), I see only speed improvements compared to 2.4

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[moocha]

[tHeoo]