[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#482273: initscripts: mountall.sh doesn't wait for kernel to scan for USB storage devices

[Phil Endecott]

Package: initscripts
Version: 2.86.ds1-13
Severity: normal


My machine has its root filesystem on an IDE disk and a second filesystem on a USB 
device.  At boot, the kernel scans for and finds the USB device concurrently with other 
activities; this process includes a deliberate pause "waiting for device to settle" 
before the SCSI system takes over and looks for partitions.  Normally the device is ready by 
the time that mountall runs and the USB filesystem is mounted OK; however, about one time in 
four, the device is not ready and it is not mounted.  Ideally, initscripts would wait 
for an extra second or two until the kernel had created the device and retry the mount.

There are a couple of related cases to compare this with:

- If an NFS mount attempt fails, a mount process will be backgrounded to keep retrying 
it.  (I think this functionality is inside mount.  See man 5 nfs.)  (Actually this can be
the wrong thing to do if the failure was e.g. "mount point does not exist" as it hides 
the actual error, see bug #389055.)

- If a USB storage device provides the root filesystem, the kernel and/or the initramfs 
code will wait for it to be ready.


Regards,  Phil.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.25
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages initscripts depends on:
ii  debianutils   2.15.3                     Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  e2fsprogs     1.38+1.39-WIP-2005.12.31-1 ext2 file system utilities and lib
ii  libc6         2.7-10                     GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  lsb-base      3.2-10                     Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  mount         2.12r-10                   Tools for mounting and manipulatin

initscripts recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information