davidcbryant
July 2nd, 2020, 09:07 PM
Hi! This morning I upgraded my Ubuntu instance from version 18.04 to the newest LTS release, 20.04. I ran it from a virtual terminal window, and it all went pretty smoothly. I did notice one peculiarity.
From the "screenlog.0" file generated by the upgrade process:
28669 Generating grub configuration file ...
28770 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
30269 Generating grub configuration file ...
30270 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
30993 Generating grub configuration file ...
30994 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
31233 Generating grub configuration file ...
31234 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
32364 Generating grub configuration file ...
32365 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
I understand that getting "grub2" configured correctly is important. But why do it five times? I have eight other instances of Linux installed on my hard drive, so each time the upgrade script ran the grub-probe program it took about 2 minutes. Probably added seven or eight minutes to the total time required to complete the upgrade.
I'm not complaining. Just making an observation. I spent twenty-five years writing assembly language programs on IBM mainframes, and that taught me to pay attention to the little things. It seems to me that the script should be written so as to execute grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg just once, as the very last step before booting into the updated system.
(Oh, yeah. I also saw it building a new initrd / initramfs at least twice. That did get done pretty quickly. Didn't have to search my entire hard disk for information.)
From the "screenlog.0" file generated by the upgrade process:
28669 Generating grub configuration file ...
28770 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
30269 Generating grub configuration file ...
30270 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
30993 Generating grub configuration file ...
30994 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
31233 Generating grub configuration file ...
31234 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
32364 Generating grub configuration file ...
32365 Found background: /usr/share/desktop-pics/KDE Plasma Abstract 340.png
...
I understand that getting "grub2" configured correctly is important. But why do it five times? I have eight other instances of Linux installed on my hard drive, so each time the upgrade script ran the grub-probe program it took about 2 minutes. Probably added seven or eight minutes to the total time required to complete the upgrade.
I'm not complaining. Just making an observation. I spent twenty-five years writing assembly language programs on IBM mainframes, and that taught me to pay attention to the little things. It seems to me that the script should be written so as to execute grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg just once, as the very last step before booting into the updated system.
(Oh, yeah. I also saw it building a new initrd / initramfs at least twice. That did get done pretty quickly. Didn't have to search my entire hard disk for information.)