Boot improvements

So the long standing issue with mouse becoming janky in parallel login sessions drove me to desperation. Having posted online on kreddit, askubuntu and forum.kde.org and getting zilch, I finally decided to install another distribution in parallel and see if the issue persists. Decided to give PopOS (ubuntu derivative by System76 folks) a shot but the installation didn’t go too well. To boot, I also managed to screw up my current installation by picking the same /boot while trying to install Pop OS. That adventure ended happily once I chrooted, fixed up boot and got back to kde neon and noticed a sluggish mouse on the first session itself. This was new and interesting and dmesg was being spammed with nvidia driver mismatch errors (I was using a kernel installed by Pop with KDE neon). That indicated a nvidia issue and sure enough, here was the issue that had troubled me no end!

Once that got sorted out I was on a high and decided to clean up a bit and also fix boot animation that got screwed. In roughly sequential order

Clean up residual config
```
dpkg -l |grep ^rc| awk '{print $2}'| sudo xargs dpkg --purge
```
Resulted in some errors (I still have mintsystem) which will not go - but overall just housecleaning
Set boot splash theme in KDE Settings Manager
- Boot splash comes up, but very late. Another Askubuntu page later and framebuffer does better.

Now I shouldn’t need the above if I have KMS (which I should have) - but nevertheless, here’s what I did for KMS

Grub config

# /etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nvidia-drm.modeset=1"
GRUB_GFXMODE="1920x1080x32"
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX="keep"

> sudo update-grub2

Initramfs

# /etc/initramfs-tools/modules

nvidia_uvm
nvidia_drm
nvidia_modeset
nvidia nvidia-drm modeset=1 NVreg_RegisterForACPIEvents=1 NVReg_EnableMSI=1 NVreg_RegistryDwords=RMUseSwI2c=0x01;RMI2cSpeed=100

> sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`

# confirm if modules are included
> lsinitramfs /boot/initrd.img-4.18.0-22-generic |less

Now from eye-candy to boot performance. I was thinking that I’d have to profile with bootchart etc that I’d come across but never used… Turns out that systemd has a few tricks up it’s hand
```
# boot time summary
systemd-analyze

# longest pole on critical path ordered by time
systemd-analyze blame

# Similar - but in a chain form
systemd-analyze critical-chain
```
So my boot was taking upwards of 40s to 1min and that shouldn’t be with an SSD.
- Culprits
  - docker.service - 15s - replace with docker.socket
  - snapd - 8s - I wasn’t using any snap packages, so - sudo apt autoremove --purge snapd
  - systemd-journal-flush - 5s - vacuum as advised

I think that’s about it - but now here’s what systemd-analyze now says:

raghu@home-desktop  ~/blog   master  systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 5.315s (kernel) + 10.297s (userspace) = 15.612s
graphical.target reached after 10.287s in userspace

Raghu Rajagopalan's ramblings

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