Re: Who is systemd-gpt-auto-generator, and why does s/he not like my partition table?
On Wed, 15 Oct 2014, Jape Person wrote:
> From dmesg
> ...[ 4.853751] systemd-gpt-auto-generator[154]: Failed to determine
> partition table type of /dev/sda: Input/output error
> [ 4.854298] systemd[151]:
> /lib/systemd/system-generators/systemd-gpt-auto-generator failed with error
> code 1.
> ... and later on ...
> [12650.204616] systemd-gpt-auto-generator[7555]: Failed to determine
> partition table type of /dev/sda: Input/output error
> ...
>
> I looked in the BTS and couldn't even find a package named
> systemd-gpt-auto-generator, much less a bug that had been filed for
> it. I guess it's a routine or function name?
It's part of systemd; it generates rules to mount partitions from GPT
partition tables without needing to express them in /etc/fstab. [See man
systemd-gpt-auto-generator for details.]
> The drive came originally from Lenovo (T520i) with and MSDOS parititon
> table. I just used the standard partition scheme provided by the
> netinst d-i (testing), so there are only /dev/sda1 and the swap
> partition present. I used ext4 as the file system.
> I'm also having the drive checked by smartmontools at boot time and
> have received no warnings.
You're basically not supposed to get I/O errors on drives like that. I'd
try running smartctl -a /dev/sda; or similar just to see whether any
errors have occured on the drive. It's possible that there's a bad
sector early on which is only exposed when something tries to find a gpt
partition table, or it could be a bug in systemd-gpt-auto-generator
which your particular setup is triggering.
You might be able to trigger it with gdisk -l /dev/sda; or similar, too.
If that doesn't turn up anything useful, file a bug against systemd, and
ask the maintainers what additional debugging information you can
provide. [It's probably severity minor, since this particularly failure
isn't going to hurt anything.]
> I thought I ought to check to see if anyone thinks this is likely to
> indicate that I'm about to get bit in the butt.
I'd make sure that I had my backups in order, but that's really just out
an abundance of caution.
--
Don Armstrong http://www.donarmstrong.com
I stared at the mountain rising over me. Empty. It was a pointless
thing to have done -- climb up it, across it, and down it. Stupid! It
looked perfect; so clean and untouched, and we had changed nothing.
[...] I had been on it too long, and it had taken everything.
-- Joe Simpson "Touching the Void" p117
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