New F11 for the XO-1 build 5-swap

Yioryos Asprobounitis mavrothal at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 16 20:54:14 UTC 2009


Here is another one
A problem I had with all the F11-XO1/osN (2,4 and 5) builds is that often they'll refuse to boot pass the "loading initrd.img" step because apparently they have a problem with the swap partition I have in my SDcard as I guess from the tail dmesg after a failed boot, shown below.

[   19.930554] olpc-ec:  running cmd 0x18
[   19.931580] olpc-ec:  sending cmd arg 0x5f
[   19.933604] olpc-ec:  received 0x22
[   25.137940] ip used greatest stack depth: 1732 bytes left
[   27.634582] Adding 258040k swap on /dev/mmcblk0p2.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:258040k SS

Removing the SDcard before boot does not solve the problem. It appears that it tries to load the partition even if not present. 
Booting from the SDcard (Ubuntu) and removing the relevant fstab line from F11-XO1/osN solves the boot problem. 
Adding back the swap line in fstab and starting swap is OK and will hold through several reboots.
Nothing seems to be wrong with the swap partition since I can immediately reboot in Ubuntu that uses the same swap partition and the swap space is there.
The problem usually appears after an abrupt shutdown. This last one was after an automatic  shutdown after a long suspend.
I never had this problem with os767/802 or Ubuntu that all use the same swap partition.

What is also strange is that although I have inactivated pretty boot, when this problem happens a never pass the ofw screen and get into the console as one would expect almost 30 seconds into the boot sequence.

I can appreciate that swap partitions may not be widely implemented in the XO1 target audience but if this is an easy problem to fix might worth looking at. XO1 can be definitely benefited from swap specially with the F11/Gnome builds.




      




More information about the Fedora-olpc-list mailing list