[arch-general] After the recent linux kernel update booting fails if usb disks are present in /etc/fstab

[Hector Martinez-Seara]

Hi Tom,
thanks for the info. My computer is i686, so i cannot test the
package. If you post later the i686 version I will be glad to test it.
Hector

On 17 May 2011 14:47, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no> wrote:
> Hi Hector,
>
> On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Hector Martinez-Seara <hseara at gmail.com> wrote:
>> After the last kernel update (I guess)  I cannot boot my system if a
>> external usb disk is present in /etc/fstab. I use default fstab  mount
>> options for the disks and they have each a single 1GB ext4 partition.
>> Note that the disk mount okay when mounted from the command line after
>> booting. Two identical disks has been tested with the same result so
>> is not a hardware problem. The disks tested are two Western digital
>> 1TB Essential Edition 2.0 (Model: wd10000h1u).
>>
>> In fact this problem was happening very seldom before (1 every 100
>> reboots) due to to the waking up time of the devices but now it is
>> every boot (only once worked). My question is: Has any thing changed
>> regarding the usb at boot time lately in the kernel? In fact, I have
>> notice a considerable speed up in the booting sequence up to the point
>> where the file system checking is done. Maybe the changes to speed up
>> the booting process have something to do with the problem I'm having?
>>
>> In my case it looks like nothing is been asked to my external drives
>> when checking the filesystems at boot. Just after, the system fails
>> claiming that it has not found the disks. In the past (two days ago),
>> some activity in ligths and spining up sound was present when the
>> system was checking the filesystems, but now everything is quiet.
>>
>> It is anybody else having the same problem?
>>
>> In the meanwhile, as I do not use this disk for booting I have add the
>> nofail option to the fstab for the two disks. Now obviously everything
>> works but the drives are not mounted. Does anybody know the best place
>> to add the mount commands for the drives so they are always accessible
>> for the users after boot?
>
> There is currently a problem with the latest udev in that it does not
> settle properly (i.e., it does not wait for dirvers to be loaded
> before continuing). This most noticeable affects people using usb
> drives or kernels without devtmpfs.
>
> Please try: <http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~teg/udev-168-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz>
> to see if the problem is solved for you, and report back at
> <https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/24288>. (assuming you are on x86_64,
> I'll do i686 tonight).
>
> That said, there is a fundamental problem with usb drives, so we
> cannot reliably mount them at boot (it probably will work in practice
> though). The problem is that there is no way to know when all usb
> devices have been enumerated (even if the drivers are loaded), so we
> don't know how long to wait before trying to mount them.
>
> This is the kind of problems solved by systemd (in community), and it
> is out of scope for the standard sysvinit initscripts (unless there is
> a solution that I am not aware of).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tom
>



-- 
Hector Martínez-Seara Monné
mail: hseara at gmail.com
Tel: +34656271145
Tel: +358442709253