Re: USB storage no-boot regression (bisected)

Arjan van de Ven
2009-04-15T20:04:43Z

On Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:32:52 +0100
Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> > Saying that we were "lucky" that things worked before is no help and
> > you should be aware that it ticks people off.
>
> No doubt those who wrote the code and never expected that timing to
> reliably work will take affront at those who blame them for it not
> working.

It's even more than that; it's OTHER code that gets faster that
can/will break this.

> Those who expected it to work and never knew it was not
> guaranteed will feel likewise in reverse.

For storage at least the solution already existed (root_wait);
it just hasn't been used consistently.

For other pieces it's hard. Non-enumeratable busses just suck;
at some point all you can do is just wait (which we have already
available today for anyone to do). I realize people don't want to
just wait 4 seconds (the people who first objected to boot time
improvements then suddenly care about boot time ;-)...

For root fs there's some options, and I have patches to basically retry
on fail. (The patches have a bug and I don't have time to solve it this
week, so I'm not submitting them)
For other devices it is hard. Realistically we need hotplug to work
well enough so that when a device shows up, we can just hook it up when
it does.

--
Arjan van de Ven Intel Open Source Technology Centre
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