Forum Discussion
Slow Boot - dxgkrnl.sys Not Loading
Just a quick update. I did try a fresh install of Windows 10. Same issue. The boot does seem to be a couple minuets faster, but this is still pretty bad. Without any further assistance, I think the next step would be replacing the motherboard, but that's not really in the budget. I think if I can't get this resolved in the next week or two I will cut my losses and go back to Linux, which was running fine prior to Windows 11. I was moving this machine to Windows for some software compatibility.
I don't know if there's a point in replying to a post a year after the fact, but I wanted to provide some information to those who are struggling with this issue of an (apparently) super slow CPU during bootup. The reason I'm posting here is because this is the only post I could find that accurately describes the symptoms that I observed on my laptop (vs. a general explanation that CPU slowdowns are caused by having too many background processes, etc.). But in my case, the issue is intermittent ... and when it happens, it can be so bad that I get a watchdog violation 0x133 (so I can compare successful bootups with normal CPU vs. successful bootups with slow CPU vs. failed bootups). Note that even if my laptop manages to bootup successfully despite a slow CPU, that slowness is permanent = doesn't eventually go away by itself (i.e. can only be resolved by rebooting and hoping for the best).
For reference, I have an Acer Aspire 5 A515-44-R41B running Windows 11.
Now I should warn people that I'm just a casual user (i.e. non-techie). My laptop is 5 years old and has been working fine for years. However, I started noticing this issue of slow bootups months ago ... but it has progressively been getting much worse (i.e. more frequent) over the past few weeks. Due to this gradual degradation, my first thought was that my hardware is failing. But whenever I ran diagnostics (e.g. on memory, SSD, corruption of Windows system files), there were never any problems. Then I also ran down the rabbit hole of thinking that it was driver related (e.g. disconnected all USB peripherals, disabled all non-Windows services and startup processes) ... but the issue did not go away.
So then I turned on logging of the bootup (via ntbtlog.txt). I (too) see multiple "dxgkrnl.sys not loaded" messages (after a successful load), BUT this always happens ... for me at least (i.e. for normal bootups as well as failed bootups). As such, it doesn't seem to be the root cause (for me). Furthermore, if I compare the various instances of watchdog violations (i.e. blue screen of death), the ntbtlog (abruptly) ends at different locations ... which suggests the CPU is simply running so slow that it is unable to complete the bootup process (i.e. quits randomly per watchdog timer).
At this point, I was not going to attempt a reinstallation of Windows (etc.) ... so the only other thing I could do (that affects the initial bootup) was fiddle with the BIOS (i.e. process of elimination). In my case, disabling the AMD virtualization settings (i.e. AMD-SVM, AMD-IOMMU) seems to help (i.e. no issues over the past week, where I normally turn my laptop on and off several times a day ... and the bootup consistently only takes a few seconds now). Of course, the issue was intermittent to begin with ... so it's hard to say anything conclusive (i.e. I'm just crossing my fingers now). Searching the internet does seem to indicate that an "incompatibility between AMD virtualization and Windows 11" is a real thing. So did this issue correspond to my upgrade from Windows 10 to 11? Could be, but ...
Anyways, that whole story was just to say the "dxgkrnl.sys issue" could be a red herring when it comes to resolving the aforementioned super slow CPU during bootup (… regardless of whether those BIOS settings are the true root cause of my problem or not).
