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    SubjectRe: 2.6.16-rc4: known regressions
    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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