I use LILO, but read your answer and tested GRUB, and you are right, GRUB starts the boot process much faster than LILO, but I was talking about the time it takes once the kernel is booting already. Isn't that independent from the bootloader used?
I experience the same problems when I use GRUB.
For instance, I see
"Serial: 8250/16550 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 4 ports, IRQ sharing enabled"
and the system seems to freeze for a while. It takes about 90 seconds for the next message (floppy0: no floppy controllers found) to show up.
-sergio
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