Re: The end of my Ultrasparc 5?!?
On 01/26/2018 01:13 AM, James Clarke wrote:
>> It' will stay like this for days....
>>
>> Actually looking back through my backups, I reinstalled sparc64 in March 2017, and the btrfs packages are included in the next backup. These have been installed all along, but the timeout behavior must have changed at some point.
>
> Interesting. You should be able to stop it loading by adding
> modprobe.blacklist=btrfs to the kernel command line.
I've seen that on my Amiga 4000 as well.
The problem is that btrfs tries to determine whether a block device is
a hard drive or not and if the block device driver misses a certain
flag (e.g. removable) it will just scan forever.
In the case of my Amiga, the btrfs module was scanning the floppy drive
for a btrfs filesystem and without a floppy disk inserted, it would
scan forever.
If your UltraSPARC 5 has a floppy disk drive, it might be doing the
same in your case. And if your machine has a floppy disk controller
but no drive attached to it, this might explain why seemingly nothing
is happening.
Don't worry, your UltraSPARC is fine. Classic Unix workstations were
built like tanks, they usually don't die unless you drop them from a
skyscraper. The only issue that can happen is the CMOS battery dying
which makes the machine sometimes behave erratically. Replacing the
battery helps wonders, sometimes a NVRAM reset is necessary.
As for btrfs: The filesystem detection code is just plain stupid.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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