initrd race conditions
I'm running the backports.org 2.6.15 kernel on an otherwise sarge
amd64 box with a couple of Opteron 275s.
It seems that modules are being loaded by the initrd at startup in
parallel. This seems to lead to serious race conditions with the
following symptoms:
1. Failure to boot at all and being dumped at a shell prompt inside
the ramdisk if the onboard SATA driver is loaded prior to the megaraid
driver. This is despite the fact that nothing is connected to
SATA. I've worked around this one by disabling the onboard SATA.
2. Almost random ordering of ethernet devices between boots. The
machine has a single e100 and two tg3 ports. Although I can believe
that the two tg3s always appear in the same order I've had the e100
detected either first, last or inbetween the two tg3s! Statically
configuring IP addresses is very hard if you don't know which will be
eth0 next time. I've not fathomed a workaround for this one. This
makes bug #342498 entered against the installer even worse.
Does anyone else see this problem? Is it likely to be amd64 specific?
I haven't really used initrds, udev or 2.6 kernels on the dual
processor x86 boxes we have so I don't know if they suffer similary.
--
Mike Crowe
Reply to: