Hi Darry,
first of all thanks for your questions, and sorry for answering late, 
I've been away for some time.

Darryl L. Miles schrieb:
> 
> Are we sure we are not talking about two different problems here.
> 
> I'm using RedHat and mkinitrd, in the initrd image there is already a 
> skeleton /dev tree that contains my real-root device.  udev also exists 
> in the initrd image.  I don't think any /dev device magic was necessary 
> for me too mount root.
> 
> It is not clear Chris which tools you are using on initrd, standard 
> Gentoo methods or a home brew setup ?  What shell is calling modprobe ?  
> Can you confirm at what point you are seeing modprobe exit ?

I am using a self-made initramfs setup using the "standard" binaries 
from the live system, usable for instance as rescue system with tools 
identical to anything I have installed, including bash as shell for the 
init script, udev, module-init-tools, lvm2, mdadm, and so on and so 
forth. There are only the most basic device nodes in the supplied /dev 
tree, like null, console, etc.
Unfortunately, I don't really "see" modprobe exit, it just takes less 
time until the "modprobe $mod && e_done" prints its "done." yet related 
device nodes are still missing. Waiting for any required nodes fixes the 
problem so far, but maybe bash-3.00 is having a similar issue as nash. 
I'll try using sash or busybox ASAP to check if the problem is somewhere 
else.

The funny thing is that with kernels up to 2.6.11.12, I don't see this 
problem. The patch mentioned further up this thread was against 
2.6.11-rc1 and should have been applied long before I even touched 
2.6.11, so I just don't understand why I have problems now.

> * Immediatly (before device driver has detected hardware and reported / 
> registered its findings).  This is the symptom I was seeing, but the 
> cause was incorrect shell handling. * After detection but before device 
> node creation.

Well, so far I cannot distinguish both of these cases, but it definitely 
is _not_ the third one:

> * After device node creation.
> 
> 
Otherwise I would not run into problems like mdadm failing trying to 
assemble arrays while disk nodes are still missing in action.

> FYI - This looks like the snippet from nash.c
> 
> [snip]

Thanks for the patch, I'll look into similarities in the bash code if 
the shell really is the cause of my trouble.