Re: 2.6.16-rc4: known regressions

[Christian Trefzer <ctrefzer@gmx.de>]

Hi everyone,


On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 09:57:38AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> I _think_ that in this particular case, the best particular choice might 
> be for the "mount" binary to be taught to re-try after a few seconds: 
> either with a command line argument, or with just the early bootup initrd 
> code being encouraged to have a loop like
> 
> 	if (mounting root failed)
> 		echo "Please press F1 to continue"
> 		do
> 			read-keyboard-with-5-second-timeout
> 		while (mounting root failed)
> 	endif
> 
> so that the user would have to press a key (or we'd just re-try every five 
> seconds).
> 
> That way, the boot wouldn't just fail immediately over something that can 
> be fixed (sometimes the root partition might just be hot-pluggable too: 
> "insert disk and continue" can be a valid way to handle issues).
> 

Is there a way to tell the kernel about which is the root device other
than through the kernel command line? If not, /init or /linuxrc could
parse /proc/cmdline for that and wait for the device node to appear.

Having the same trouble with my crude bloated glibc initramfs, I
resorted to waiting for /dev/hdX to appear after ide module insertion in
a loop with one second delay. AFAICS the loop is taken three times at
most on my slowest box, so five seconds seems a bit much, IMHO.

Trivial shell code goes like

echo -n "Waiting for root device to appear"
while [ ! -e $rootdevice ]
do
	sleep 1s
	echo -n "."
done
echo " OK."

The only downside here would be devices specified as hex numbers, and we
have an endless loop in case something went wrong. The latter can be
addressed with a counter checked against some sane limit.

Worked fine for me every time, except once when I build an image without
the IDE controller's module : /


Chris

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