[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#464418: initscripts does not wait for devices before swapon

[Eric Windisch]

Subject: initscripts does not wait for devices before swapon
Package: initscripts
Version: 2.86.ds1-38
Severity: normal

*** Please type your report below this line ***

Initscripts does not wait for devices to become available before  
running the swapon command.

On our systems, swap is rarely activated at boot, and must be done  
manually by the administrator.  On low memory systems, this can  
prevent various other on-boot scripts from executing successfully via  
init.  We have only experienced this problem on our dual quad-core AMD  
Opteron machines.  Presumably the higher performance offered by these  
machines  is more likely to trigger was is essentially a race  
condition.  We have worked around this issue by placing 'sleep 15'  
into mountall.sh prior to the swapon command; however, a proper  
permanent fix would be beneficial to all.

It should be noted that we have also attempted to resolve this issue  
by specifying our swap device as /dev/.static/dev/sda2 (where /dev/ 
sda2 is our normal device).  Unfortunately, this attempted solution  
was not successful.

My company can provide root access to an affected virtual machine to  
the appropriate debian maintainer.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
   APT prefers stable
   APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-5-xen-vserver-amd64
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)

Versions of packages initscripts depends on:
ii  deb 2.17                                 Miscellaneous utilities  
specific t
ii  e2f 1.39+1.40-WIP-2006.11.14+dfsg-2etch1 ext2 file system  
utilities and lib
ii  lib 2.3.6.ds1-13etch4                    GNU C Library: Shared  
libraries
ii  lsb 3.1-23.2etch1                        Linux Standard Base 3.1  
init scrip
ii  mou 2.12r-19                             Tools for mounting and  
manipulatin
ii  sys 2.86.ds1-38                          System-V-like utilities

Versions of packages initscripts recommends:
ii  psmisc                        22.3-1     Utilities that use the  
proc filesy

-- no debconf information