Slow boot time due to timeouts

I have installed Endeavouros/plasma on an external ssd for my HP windows 11 laptop without nvida graphics; everything is working ok but the boot time is around 2 minutes ! After a couple of weeks I have decided to look in to it. Running journalctl -b -p 3 to look at errors shown in the boot log gives two timeouts: waiting for device /dev/tpm0 and waiting for device /dev/tpmrm0. Researching I have not found anything here but for other distros have seen suggestions to run sudo systemctl mask dev-tpmrm0.device or to add module_blacklist=tpm,tpm_tis,tpm_crb to /etc/kernel/cmdline.

I am relatively new to Linux so a bit nervous of messing with the kernel. Any help will be much appreciated

Just to get a finer-grained list of the culprits, use

systemd-analyze blame

to get a list of all boot time tasks and their timings, and post the results please.

I am away from home at the moment (just had a spare hour to look for a solution) back home Sunday and will post the results on Monday

I assume this is connected via USB? Perhaps keep in mind that USB presents a considerable bottleneck, as compared to an internally installed SSD.

That’s not to suggest it isn’t worth investigating, as there may be other factors here. It would be normal though, for a USB connected drive to take longer to boot than an internal one.

Here is the link to the log https://dpaste.com/G4GM8B9UG

8 years ago, somebody posted a similar time issue on the Arch forums.

The man-db service seems to be a culprit with 36 seconds of the boot. There’s good information in the thread:

  • Why is the man-db service enabled instead of relying on the timer?

See if the man-db service is enabled on your system, and if you can switch to a timer based execution (which seems to be the default). Post the output of

sudo systemctl status man-db.service

The thread contains the information on how to switch over.

No other culprit wastes as much time, so I think man-db should be your top priority.

Wow, I remember that and I remember having the same issue. Is that sort of configuration still around (many distro swaps/reloads and I don’t remember running into it anytime recently)?

Thank you I will have a read over the next couple of days and report back