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

[Robert Millan]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 01:51:52PM +1030, Arthur Marsh wrote:
> 
> I suspect that the problem was actually a flaky cd-rw drive in /dev/hdc 
> which caused the open("/dev/hdc", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) call in 
> grub-mkdevicemap to hang.

GRUB should skip CD-ROM drives, as it doesn't support them yet.  It already
does that.  However, in order to determine if an ATA drive is a CD you have
to open() it first.

Anyway, are you sure it's the open() call that made it hang?  Maybe dmesg /
klogd registered something.  In that case, this is a Linux bug and should be
reassigned (i.e. Linux should be more fault tollerant and allow open()ing
drives even if they're unusable, because one might just want to open them
for the purpose of CDROM_GET_CAPABILITY ioctl).

-- 
Robert Millan

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