Re: Analyzed/Solved/Bisected: Booting 2.6.30-rc2-git7 very slow

Martin Knoblauch
2009-05-20T10:22:35Z

----- Original Message ----

> From: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
> To: Martin Knoblauch <knobi@knobisoft.de>
> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>; viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk; rjw@sisk.pl; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; tigran@aivazian.fsnet.co.uk
> Sent: Wednesday, May 6, 2009 10:37:45 AM
> Subject: Re: Analyzed/Solved: Booting 2.6.30-rc2-git7 very slow
>
> On Wed, 2009-05-06 at 00:55 -0700, Martin Knoblauch wrote:
>
> > just to bring this back to my problem :-)
>
> Good idea :-)
>
> > Last week I reported that the "new" sysfs entry in /proc/mounts already comes
> out of initrd. Does this ring a bell?
> >
> > http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0904.3/03048.html
>
> Nope, no bells.
>
> The only thing I can suggest is that you try a bisection.
>
> -Mike

OK, so I finally managed to bisect the issue down to the following commit. Not much that I can say about it. Someone else suggested that it might all be a question of timing. Might very well be. I will try it out on a system with a different SCSI/RAID controller. The failing system has an "Smart Array 6i" (cciss). "cciss", "ext3" and "jbd" are all modules coming from initrd.

|commit 1120f8b8169fb2cb51219d326892d963e762edb6
|Author: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
|Date: Thu Dec 18 09:17:16 2008 -0800
|
| PCI: handle long delays in VPD access
|
| Accessing the VPD area can take a long time. The existing
| VPD access code fails consistently on my hardware. There are comments
|
| Change the access routines to:
| * use a mutex rather than spinning with IRQ's disabled and lock held
| * have a much longer timeout
| * call cond_resched while spinning
|
| Signed-off-by: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>
| Reviewed-by: Matthew Wilcox <willy@linux.intel.com>
| Signed-off-by: Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>

Cheers
Martin