Re: Hotplug *seems* to hang during boot]

[Richard Wild <richard-wild@ntlworld.com>]

Hi Dave,

thanks for your reply. Reading it made me think that the first thing to 
try should be to recompile the 2.6.7 kernel with no PCMCIA support at 
all. This is duly did, and when I attempted to boot the kernel cardmgr 
reported that there was no pcmcia driver in /proc/devices as your 
message suggested.

Unfortunately, hotplug still did not start. Whatever the problem is, 
that wasn't it.

Interestingly, I tried booting the 2.6 kernel with "nohotplug" as an 
option; this enabled it to boot as I said earlier (but with no NIC 
function). I then decided to run "/etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug start" to see 
what would happen. It did not merely block as I expected but completely 
locked up the system: mouse, keyboard, no interrupts working at all as 
far as I could see.

I hate to be a luser but I am quite stuck here. I'll do whatever 
investigation is necessary but I could really use some advice on where 
to start.

Thanks,
Rich.

Dave Dodge wrote:

>On Mon, Oct 04, 2004 at 07:14:07PM +0000, Richard Wild wrote:
>  
>
>>Some other information noticed: it seems (to me) quite likely that the 
>>message "cardmgr[953]: no sockets found!" is related to the problem, 
>>because when I boot the 2.4 kernel is says instead "cardmgr[80]: no 
>>pcmcia driver in /proc/devices".
>>    
>>
>
>cardmgr is a bit strange in how it accesses devices.  Here's a quick
>explanation in case it's relevant to the problem.
>
>"no pcmcia driver in /proc/devices":
>
>That means just what it says.  cardmgr wants the major device number for
>the pcmcia driver, so it reads through /proc/devices looking for it.
>This error message indicates that it did not find a "pcmcia" line,
>presumably because no driver was loaded.
>
>"no sockets found!":
>
>This indicates that it _did_ find "pcmcia" listed in /proc/devices,
>and it tried to access the driver.  Here's where things get a bit
>unusual.  After obtaining the major device number from /proc/devices,
>cardmgr uses mknod(2) to create device files of its own.  It starts
>with minor device 0 and continues in a one-up loop until it fails.
>For each minor number, it creates a device file with a name of the
>form "cm-PID-COUNTER", opens the file, and then immediately unlinks
>the file while holding it open.  There are a number of directories
>where it might try to do this, usually in this order:
>
>  /var/lib/pcmcia, /var/run, /dev, /tmp
>
>The "no sockets found" message indicates that it managed to do the
>mknod for minor device 0, but got an ENODEV when it then tried to open
>the resulting file.
>
>So what this seems to be saying is that:
>
>  - your 2.4 kernel has no PCMCIA stuff loaded at all.
>
>  - your 2.6 kernel has at least the "ds" driver, which
>    creates the "pcmcia" /proc/devices entry, but it has no
>    card sockets.
>
>I don't know if this is part of your problem or not, but since cardmgr
>does do some device file manipulation, it might be worth investigating.
>
>                                                  -Dave Dodge
>
>
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