On Sun, Nov 11, 2001 at 04:00:24PM +0100, Michael Schmitz wrote: > > > What did you do in mac-fdisk to get a kernel panic? What kernel version > > > did you use? > > > > Ethan told me on IRC that this is a known problem with all PowerPC > > kernels to date. Apparently there is a race condition involved in > > (re-)reading the partition table from a drive. > > Imagine my surprise - I thought it might be a mac-fdisk bug (though I'm > sure it never happened to me). ive only seen it occur on a G4 i was setting up, it seems most common on SMP boxes, but happens occasionally on everything from oldworld crap to the newest tibook/ibook2s/G4s. > What kernel versions are affected? Maybe it's possible to sync before > rereading the partition table or something? 2.*.* kernels are affected. and this always happens AFTER the new partition table is already completly synced to disk, once you reboot your partition table is just fine, just as you wanted it to be when you pressed the `w' command. the panic is clearly caused by the `reread partition table ioctl' its also reasonable to assume its some sort of bug in the mac partition table code since ive never heard of this happening on other architectures, or on powerpcs which don't use apple partition tables. i think the other posters point was if you bootstraped from the tmp placeholder partition, or are erasing CruftOS and the kernel dies when rereading the partition table you have to find an alternate method of booting, such as CDROM or tftp. it would be nice if someone who knows the kernel internals could look for this bug and fix it. *cough* benh *hint* *cough* -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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