Re: USB storage no-boot regression (bisected)

Mark Lord
2009-04-15T15:37:57Z

Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:25:05 -0400
> Mark Lord <lkml@rtr.ca> wrote:
>
>> Greg KH wrote:
>>> ..
>>> The issue is that you were just lucky that your machine worked
>>> properly previously. My boxes with the same type of setup didn't,
>>> so I quickly realized what the root delay boot option was for. You
>>> need to just do the same thing here, there's nothing else we can do.
>> ..
>>
>> Bad excuse.
>>
>> SATA drives also take variable amounts of time to "show up" at boot.
>> Perhaps Jeff should customize libata for your and Arjan's exact
>> setups, just to help with understanding the point here. :)
>
> the difference is that with sata you know when you are done and have all
> possible drives. No so much much with USB. So with SATA we can, and do,
> wait for the scan to complete at the right point in the boot.
>
>> The speed ups are fine (and welcome), but we really now need
>> Arjan to follow-up with a patch to have the kernel *by default*
>> wait a little longer for the rootfs to show up.
>>
>> Not forever, just a few seconds to compensate for the regression.
>
> seconds!!!!!
> The whole kernel boots in half a second!
..

Oh, absolutely I agree.

That's why I'm not suggesting a DELAY,
but rather a TIMEOUT (where it keeps trying up until the timeout).

For desktop, it should really just wait forever,
but I can understand situations (server room)
where that would be a Really Bad Idea.

So just have it sit there and retry the rootfs for a few seconds,
to compensate for this regression and also for others that have
yet to be discovered / reported.

Everyone's life will be easier that way.

Cheers