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Filesystem becomes read-only when emerging GNOME
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srasku
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 14, 2014 6:09 pm    Post subject: Filesystem becomes read-only when emerging GNOME Reply with quote

I am trying to build GNOME in a Mac-hosted VM. I am using VirtualBox 4.3.2 r93733.

The emerge failed when the filesystem became read-only. I verified by trying to touch a file in root's home directory. I tried to cat /var/log/emerge.log but it gives an I/O error. A number of commands don't run (vi, shutdown, reboot). They fail with I/O errors. I had to manually reset the VM.

I think it may be a misconfigured kernel. My kernel .config is at: http://pastebin.com/R0dXhAVc
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vaxbrat
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 15, 2014 1:53 am    Post subject: Check your messages Reply with quote

You don't mention what you are using for your rootfs. If a filesystem becomes readonly all of a sudden, it's usually an indication of a hardware failure during i/o. It's likely your vm image includes one or more sectors that the underlying hard drive has decided are on the verge of failure and about to be locked out. Or it's possible the entire drive is failing. When you reboot, things are writeable to start with. The emerge i/o stresses the drive or hits the bad spot causing the kernel to throw the filesystem into readonly mode.
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i92guboj
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 15, 2014 9:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Either the underlying hardware is failing or you have hit a bug in your VM software, or one of the VM's drivers. By "VM's drivers" I mean either the drivers you need to load to make the VM software work or one of the kernel drivers (fs drivers, sata controller drivers, etc.) that are part of the kernel that runs inside the VM.
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srasku
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 16, 2014 12:21 am    Post subject: Re: Check your messages Reply with quote

vaxbrat wrote:
You don't mention what you are using for your rootfs.

I am using ext3 for my rootfs.
vaxbrat wrote:
If a filesystem becomes readonly all of a sudden, it's usually an indication of a hardware failure during i/o.

This is plausible. I would like to move the VM onto an external drive. It's newer than the internal drive in the Mac. I have a snapshot of the VM. Is it possible to migrate to a different drive?
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srasku
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 16, 2014 2:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I cloned the VM and then moved the clone. This merges the snapshot and I only have one .vdi to deal with at that point. I've restarted the emerge. So far so good but it will take several hours.

Thanks for the insight.
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srasku
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 16, 2014 3:54 am    Post subject: No joy ... Reply with quote

Even after moving the VM to a different hard-drive, I still get the same error. Any other ideas on how to trouble-shoot this?
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i92guboj
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 16, 2014 7:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'll repeat: "the hardware" is not necessarily physical hardware. It can be so. But it can be your VM software or a buggy driver in either your host or your guest kernel. Whatever thing that the VM sees as "hardware".

Virtualbox has three modules that need to be loaded in the host system for it to work. Double check that those are compiled against your latest kernel. If in doubt, recompile them and reboot. If the problem is in either of these, keeping an eye over the dmesg output in the host might provided some hint (maybe one of vboxdrv, vboxnetflt or vboxnetadp is segfaulting or something).

I am almost sure that's your virtual hardware. It could be either RAM or HD as well, but then you would get the same kind of problem in the host, and not only in the guest.

Failing this, you might want to check the virtualbox mailing list. Maybe someone more knowledgeable around there can give you some pointers on how to debug this :)
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srasku
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 16, 2014 1:03 pm    Post subject: Host is a Mac Reply with quote

The host is an iMac running Lion so I won't be able to recompile any kernel modules on the host. I looked at the logs and I couldn't see anything obvious. I will try and reproduce the problem after work while I watch kernel.log and system.log on the host to see if I see any correlations.
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i92guboj
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 16, 2014 1:21 pm    Post subject: Re: Host is a Mac Reply with quote

srasku wrote:
The host is an iMac running Lion so I won't be able to recompile any kernel modules on the host. I looked at the logs and I couldn't see anything obvious. I will try and reproduce the problem after work while I watch kernel.log and system.log on the host to see if I see any correlations.


Sorry. I missed that bit of info. I can't help you with anything mac-related because I have never owned one. But there must be a reason why you are getting this odd behavior. If the host OS has a way to keep a watch over files, you should also investigate if something else is manipulating the hd image files (the .vdi file, usually).
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