Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> writes:
> On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 08:50:27AM -0700, Jim Bodkikns (Dakotacom) wrote:
>> ALL of the servers chosen to be reinstalled with a debian distro have
>> high performance raid controllers and fail installs due to UDEV issues. (I
>> hate that redhat handles this - I"m not really a fan of redhat). I have
>> been forced to abandon debian distros as a result. I'm not happy about that
>> - I prefer debian - but find that it cannot be deployed and I have received
>> zero interest from anyone from the hotplug group down to even acknowledge
>> that this is a problem in general. So I am going to deploy FC bordeaux
>> instead.
>>
>> I am only reporting this to let people know that this is an issue, sadly,
>> that you might consider addressing. Thanks for a terrific distro otherwise
>> though.
>
> I don't see it as a general issue either; if you have problems of this type,
> you should report them to the bug tracking system so that they can be fixed.
> Debian as an organization can't hope to test all of the hardware available
> in the market, so we rely on feedback from folks such as yourself to let us
> know when there is a problem.
The most hideous problem of hotplug/udev is the following:
You can't wait for an hotplug/udev event to be done processing. That
is always done asynchron without any feedback of completion.
Consequently any module loading has to randomly wait a while till
devices show up before using it. A simple thing as
modprobe my-harddisk-module
mount /dev/my-hard-disk
will randomly fail or succeed depending on current scheduling. Any
sequence of loading a module and using the expected device node has to
utilize a sleep statement and prey udev runs fast enough to complete
in the given time.
MfG
Goswin