How I Shaved 45 Seconds Off My Linux Boot Time (An AMD X570 & Intel Arc Love Story)

Neomodus Neo — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:33:01 +0000

We all know that feeling. You build a absolute monster of a rig—we are talking an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, a blazing-fast NVMe SSD, and a shiny new Intel Arc B580 (Battlemage) GPU. You fire up Linux Mint, and once you are on the desktop, everything flies at the speed of light.

But there was a catch. A massive, frustrating catch.

Every single time I hit the power button, the machine would just... sit there. The kernel was taking a painful 37 to 39 seconds just to initialize, stretching the total boot time to well over a minute. On a machine like this? Absolutely unacceptable.

If your high-end Linux rig is throwing a tantrum at boot, here is how we tracked down the culprits and chopped the boot time down to a majestic 17 seconds flat.

The Mystery of the 37-Second Black Hole
When troubleshooting boot delays, your best friends are systemd-analyze and dmesg. Running a quick check showed that while my firmware and userspace were loading in just a few seconds, the kernel was stuck in a time loop.

Digging into the kernel logs using dmesg, we spotted a massive gap right at the beginning of the boot process:

[ 1.066819] evm: security.SMACK64EXEC
[ 38.337431] systemd[1]: Set up automount...
Almost 37 seconds of pure, unadulterated silence. No errors, no warnings, just nothingness. What was the kernel doing?

Trapping the Culprits
By digging deeper into the logs right as the system woke up from its slumber, we unmasked two major culprits that were paralyzing the boot process.

The Intel Battlemage Firmware Crisis Right after the long pause, dmesg spit out this revealing nugget:

[ 38.273747] xe 0000:0b:00.0: [drm] GuC firmware (70.49.4) is recommended, but only (70.44.1) was found in xe/bmg_guc_70.bin
[ 38.273750] xe 0000:0b:00.0: [drm] Consider updating your linux-firmware pkg...
Bingo! The brand-new Intel Arc B580 physical 8-lane card was trying to initialize using the cutting-edge xe driver. The driver was frantically searching the system for the recommended version 70.49.4 of the GuC/HuC microcode. Because the default linux-firmware package in the distro only had an older version, the kernel hung there, hitting a massive timeout before finally giving up and falling back to the older firmware.

The Ghost of Hibernations Past To make matters worse, as we rebuilt the boot environment, another hidden warning popped up:

I: The initramfs will attempt to resume from /dev/nvme1n1p2 (UUID=)
I: Set the RESUME variable to override this.
The system's initialization ramdisk (initramfs) was actively searching a non-existent or misconfigured swap partition for hibernation recovery data on every single cold boot. Another classic timeout trap!

The 2-Minute Fix
Once you know exactly what is wrong, fixing it on Linux is a breeze. Here is the exact recipe we used to cut the fat:

Step 1: Force-feed the Latest Intel Firmware
Instead of waiting for the distribution to update its official packages, we pulled the latest Battlemage firmware binaries directly from the source at kernel.org and updated the initial ramdisk:

Bash
cd /lib/firmware/xe/
sudo wget https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/plain/xe/bmg_guc_70.bin -O bmg_guc_70.bin
sudo update-initramfs -u -k all

Step 2: Silence the Timeouts in GRUB
Next, we told the kernel to stop searching for non-existent hibernation data (noresume), and while we were at it, optimized the PCIe bus by disabling aggressive power management (pcie_aspm=off) and error reporting (pci=noaer) which can sometimes choke high-end AMD/Intel combos at boot.

We opened /etc/default/grub and updated the default line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=off pci=noaer noresume"
Followed by a quick:

Bash
sudo update-grub
The Verdict: From Sluggish to F1 Car
After a quick reboot, we ran systemd-analyze again. Prepare your eyes:

Startup finished in 8.738s (firmware) + 3.656s (loader) + 2.721s (kernel) + 2.435s (userspace) = 17.552s
graphical.target reached after 2.362s in userspace.
Kernel boot time dropped from 36.9 seconds to a ridiculous 2.7 seconds. The whole system now boots completely under 18 seconds, with the actual Linux environment loading almost instantly the moment the motherboard hand-off happens.

The moral of the story? Early adoption of brand-new GPU architectures on Linux sometimes requires a little manual tweaking, but once you give the kernel exactly what it’s looking for, the hardware will absolutely scream.

Happy hacking!

DEV Community: Neomodus Neo

How I Shaved 45 Seconds Off My Linux Boot Time (An AMD X570 & Intel Arc Love Story)