Re: current linus bk, error mounting root

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

(Adds lots of cc's.  I trust that's OK).

Jon Smirl <jonsmirl@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> No, I think Jens wants all of the distributions to fix it. I have
> filed a bug with Fedora on it.
> 
> Something changed in the timing for loading drivers during boot. You
> used to be able to do:
> modprobe ata_piix
> mount /dev/sda1
> 
> Now you have to do this:
> modprobe ata_piix
> sleep 1
> mount /dev/sda1
> 
> I suspect the problem is that udev doesn't get a chance to run anymore. 
> The sleep 1 allows it to run and it creates /dev/sda1.
> Build ata_piix in and the problem goes away too.
> 
> Jens is right that this is a user space issue, but how many people are
> going to find this out the hard way when their root drives stop
> mounting. Since no one is complaining I have to assume that most
> kernel developers have their root device drivers built into the
> kernel. I was loading mine as a module since for a long time Redhat
> was not shipping kernels with SATA built in.

I don't agree that this is a userspace issue.  It's just not sane for a
driver to be in an unusable state for an arbitrary length of time after
modprobe returns.