New F11 for the XO-1 build 5-swap

Yioryos Asprobounitis mavrothal at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 18 09:23:34 UTC 2009


OK... my last failed boot was even more interesting... 
As "usually" booted Ubuntu from the SD-card and removed the swap line from fstab hopping for a recovery, but the system kept loading swap on /dev/mmcblk0p2 as you can see below in the logs and kept failing boot with the "loading ... initrd.img" as the last message on the ofw screen.

Logs after loading to Ubuntu and mounting NAND (olpcmtd0)
root at OLPC:~# more /media/olpcmtd0/etc/fstab 
/dev/root  /         ext3    defaults,noatime 0 0
devpts     /dev/pts  devpts  gid=5,mode=620   0 0
tmpfs      /dev/shm  tmpfs   defaults         0 0
proc       /proc     proc    defaults         0 0
sysfs      /sys      sysfs   defaults         0 0
/tmp            /tmp            tmpfs         rw          0 0
varcacheyum     /var/cache/yum  tmpfs         rw,mode=755 0 0
vartmp          /var/tmp        tmpfs         rw          0 0
none            /ofw            promfs        defaults    0 0

root at OLPC:~# tail /media/olpcmtd0/var/log/dmesg
[   19.910660] olpc-ec:  received 0x4b
[   19.911678] olpc-ec:  received 0xce
[   19.915229] olpc-ec:  running cmd 0x15
[   19.917259] olpc-ec:  received 0x41
[   19.917278] olpc-ec:  running cmd 0x18
[   19.918299] olpc-ec:  sending cmd arg 0x5f
[   19.920322] olpc-ec:  received 0x22
[   19.987194] mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
[   25.269277] ip used greatest stack depth: 1732 bytes left
[   27.747985] Adding 258040k swap on /dev/mmcblk0p2.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:258040k SS

_note the "SS" at the end_ normally not present when booting is OK


Removing the card altogether, kept failing trying to load the non-existing /dev/mmcblk0p2 swap partition.
The "solution" this time was to re-introduce the swap line in fstab and load the card again!!! 
Pls note that every failure was repeated with the same settings more than once before I changed the settings.

So there is something strange with the swap handling and/or dev loading in these builds. It would appear that there is (occasionally generated) a persisting swap loading entry somewhere or swap is not unmounted cleanly or... This independent of the fstab file content. This event is (visually) associated with the inability the boot process to go to the console mode (when pretty boot is inactivated) although the process goes on as evident by the dmesg log.
 
An additional indication about swap/dev handling may be that if you have a swap partition on a card defined in fstab and then remove the card, the messages during boot (pressing the check game key) in udev /etc/fstab swaps show a nice green "[OK]" (!?) where with F9 builds the message was a red "[FAIL]" when the card was missing.
   
I do not know if this is intentional or if it is an F11 or an OFW issue (I'm using q2e41). All I can tell is that in my system occasionally there are issues with the loading of the swap partition that lead to system freezes during boot.
Now if this needs further examination, is up to the persons directly involved with the development to decide. 



      




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