Bug#655347: upgrade-reports: initramfs prompt on boot, 4.6.3. of release notes not from end user perspective

[Francis Picabia <fpicabia@gmail.com>]

Package: upgrade-reports
Severity: normal

I have personally encountered the problem referenced at 4.6.3 of the upgrade
release notes, on several systems.  All of them boot from software mirror
RAID on SCSI hardware from 2002 to 2006 vintage.  In each case, I needed
to add the kernel option rootdelay=9 to allow the system to boot.

I did not find the solution in the release notes because the symptoms
of the problem are not specifically mentioned in 4.6.3.  When the problem
happens, to the end user point of view, it fails to find the root
file system and dumps us out to the initramfs prompt.  We are not
aware this is a timing issue with udev, so the heading "Boot timing issues"
does not catch the eye.  The current heading does not describe
the problem well from the end user perspective.

I feel this problem would be identified in the release notes if there is
specific mention of the initramfs shell/prompt rather than the vague
reference to "a debug shell".  If that section could be rewritten to
describe what happens from the end user's perspective, with
details like what text is shown, what prompt appears, it would help.

I also feel this issue should be found under section 4.5 (possible issues
during upgrade). 


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.3
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_CA, LC_CTYPE=en_CA (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash