Bug#459199: Acknowledgement (grub-pc: locks up when upgrading)

[Robert Millan]

On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 11:49:29PM +1030, Arthur Marsh wrote:
> 
> 
> Robert Millan wrote, on 05/01/08 22:52:
> >On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 03:20:31AM +1030, Arthur Marsh wrote:
> >>Previously, the upgrade was locking up when running grub-mkdevicemap 
> >>which was calling:
> >>
> >>open("/dev/hdc", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE
> >
> >That sounds unlikely;  it would mean this is a bug in Linux.  Are you sure 
> >it
> >was locked in that call, rather than _after_ it?
> >
> >You can use gdb to determine.  Try building a debug grub-mkdevicemap
> >(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nostrip,noopt,debug), run it with gdb and interrupt it
> >where it has hung, then obtain a backtrace ("bt").
> >
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion... I'm not sure how to reproduce the problem 
> condition as I had done a week's worth of twice-daily upgrades to Debian 
> unstable before this lock-up.
> 
> What does grub-mkdevicemap do?

It scans your devices and generates /boot/grub/device.map.

As a general advice, when you find a problem like this one, try to obtain some
debugging output before trying to work around it.  Otherwise it's almost
impossible to fix unreproducible problems :-(

Please see if you can get into the same situation again.  If not, we'll
probably have to close this bug..

-- 
Robert Millan

<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)