Bug#594472: grub-pc: scary messages and very long boot time after upgrade

[Dh H]

> thanks for the analysis. I'm under the impression that mdadm does
> assemble the raids, but then fails to recognize the partition table.
> But I don't know whether this is still in the realm of mdadm's
> responsibility, or whether some other package (linux-image-*?) should
> be responsible instead.
>
Correct, it assembles the raids and moans about an unrecognized partition table.
The latter I assume is normal, since mdo (in my case) is an ext3
partition and not a disk with a partition table, the same applies to
md1, which is not anything that could be recognized as a valid disk,
because it is completely encrypted.

Agree it could be anything, even udev, where I found some references
to. Nevertheless, MDADM 3.1.2 seems to worsen the problem, as does the
current Grub2.

>> When rebooting I have the same behaviour as what you described first;
>
> Now *this* sounds dangerous: Failing to reboot for a newly-installed
> system. This means that re-installing a box wouldn't fix the problem,
> but only recreate it.
>
Correct, and it is replicable, which should allow someone with more
technical knowledge than me to analyse in detail. Given the fact this
happens on a VM makes me confident it is not Hardware related. I run
on a laptop with two disks and an intel dual core, which is fairly
different to your quad ;).

> My system's "thinking period" was ended by OOM-killer because something
> ate all my RAM. I already submitted messages which included tracebacks
> which I can't make too much sense of right now.
>
Could not check this, I only gave 512M to the VM and the 'thinking
period' was quite short, a good part of a minute I guess.

> I didn't dare to turn the machine off since it last took so long to
> boot, but (of course) would like to.
>
I rebooted mine several times now. Only have to help with the busybox
commands to get it up and running. That seems fairly stable ;)

> I can't inspect my system very well, but from the sound of the fans,
> the CPU must be sizzling hot.
my fan does not quite go to loud mode, dunno why at 100% cpu
utilisation I would expect it. On the otherhand the machine does not
feel too hot either.