Re: Problem source verified -Re: Jessie (8.0) slow to boot
On Fri 02 Sep 2016 at 09:40:55 (+0200), Michael Biebl wrote:
> Am 01.09.2016 um 16:44 schrieb David Wright:
> > On Thu 01 Sep 2016 at 13:11:22 (+0100), Darac Marjal wrote:
> >> On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 07:02:14AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> >>> On 8/31/2016 11:25 AM, Richard Owlett wrote:
> >>> I believe this justifies a bug report against the installer.
> >>> My expected behavior would be to check to see if a swap area
> >>> already exists before "creating" a swap partition. Especially
> >>> since replacing a swap partition can break a previously
> >>> functioning install in a multi-boot situation.
> >>>
> >>> Comments?
> >>
> >> I think that sounds sensible. A swap partition should be considered
> >> scratch space, and its contents only relevant to the
> >> currently-booted OS.
> >
> > I disagree. If you want to share swap space, then you've got to
> > take appropriate action yourself. The easy way is to LABEL it in
> > /etc/fstab rather than UUID it, unless you like reading and typing
> > long strings of hex.
>
> Well, you can assign labels, but this won't help you. As soon as you
> install a new system on the same hardware, the (debian)-installer will
> reformat your existing swap partition and the label will be gone along
> with it. I've run into this myself a couple of times.
I already wrote that in this thread:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/08/msg01052.html
and hadn't realised I had to repeat myself just because the thread's
subject line was modified. Or maybe because the month clicked forward.
> This has been the case forever basically. The only difference was, that
> sysvinit didn't care, and you simply ended up with your system having no
> swap partition set up. Systemd is much more picky in that regard (and
> rightfully so, imho).
In which regard. I'm running systemd with no swap and it doesn't care.
Basically, if "KiB Swap: ... 0 used," is anything but zero, I might as
well reboot; any idea of getting work done while swapping is risible,
disk access is so slow. But I guess you may just mean that systemd
cares about /etc/fstab in a way that sysvinit didn't, rather than the
swap line in particular. Ironic, as systemd plays fast and loose with
fstab as far as the fstab documentation is concerned.
> I think treating an *existing* swap partition like a non-empty partition
> and not reformatting it by default would be right thing to do.
OTOH the people who benefit are likely to be the people who understand
the issues. I would prefer a Non-defaulting option to save the
tediousness of working round the current default. That way, the naïve
tyro gets exactly what they expect from the installer, a clean slate.
Doing it my way (see ref) contravenes the recommendations of the
Installation Manual. But, while we're on the topic, perhaps you can
explain the reasoning behind this paragraph from §6.3.8.2:
"Note: Although you can do basically anything in a shell that the
available commands allow you to do, the option to use a shell is
really only there in case something goes wrong and for debugging.
"Doing things manually from the shell may interfere with the
installation process and result in errors or an incomplete
installation. In particular, you should always use let the installer
activate your swap partition and not do this yourself from a shell."
Cheers,
David.
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