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Re: initrd race conditions



Mike Crowe wrote:

>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.
>  
>
I actually had this exact problem myself for the first time this morning
with my X2 system, with an initrd built by initramfs-tools.

Using yaird may help because AIUI it will only load the modules required
to mount the root filesystem during the initramfs stage, or at least
will load those first.

>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.
>  
>
You can fix the names of network interfaces using udev-- istr that's
available in sarge, even though a kernel that supports it isn't (fun).

e.g. I have:

bash$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/010_local.rules
# Local rules

# eth0: dl2k (gigabit adaptor)
SUBSYSTEM="net", SYSFS{address} = "00:05:5d:9a:a3:a8", NAME="eth0"

# ethX: e100 (onboard)
SUBSYSTEM="net", SYSFS{address} = "00:02:a5:cf:bb:d4", NAME="ethX"

This renames my onboard ethernet adaptor to ethX to keep it out of the
way because the BIOS doesn't permit disabling it (grumble).

HTH

SRH



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