various errors caused by some delay issue in USB

elninio · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2008 Posts: 53

Usually, rootwait or rootdelay is used to allow the USB drivers time to initialize for usb booting. I am using rootwait.

If my kernel isn't crammed with a lot of things, It waits indefinitly. With rootdelay=100 (100 seconds, not miliseconds), I get cannot find root 0,0 , or cannot find root 8,37 errors, depending on what I crammed in the kernel. I know I have the sufficient necessary built-ins because it will boot correctly if I throw in random things like RAID support, enough to delay a boot.

I wouldn't know where to start the pasting of information. I think we can eliminate grub and fstab problems, the partition shows in the list of recommended partitions, its not an 'sda versus hda' notation issue. The kernel is found, the root partition is found as evidenced. The problem is predictable to this extent, but not quite predictable in the error it produces (depends how much kernel delay i add).

The kernel boot line: kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 rootwait
Kernel version 2.6.35

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 12:23 am Post subject:

elninio,

You get unknown-block (0,0) if you miss out the hard drive controller software from the kernel. unknown-block (8,37) means that the kernel found major device 8 minor device 37 but could not understand the filesystem there.
8,37 is /dev/sdc5.

Thats interesting as it should correspond to root=/dev/sdb1, which would be 8,17. Is there a typo here somewhere?

Why are you using rootwait or rootdelay ?

mjackson · n00b Joined: 11 Feb 2011 Posts: 19

Hi
I don't know about your problem but I thought I would pass on some of my finds when trying to install multiple linuxs. I had the idea at first I would install them at first on different usb drives use them and see exactly what they needed and how they would install. Sounded like a good fool proof idea right. I have quite a few drives and devices I have accumulated over the past two or three years. Some are just a cable with all electronics in the sockets, other were stand alone usb drives. The one I have used the most is a usb device which allows sata drives to be plugin(literally dropin). Note all were usb drives and my laptop supports usb booting. To cut the chase not all worked but the most interesting one was the sata plug in device. It has a slot which one can drop any sata drive into and then plugged into the usb port. I have numerous sata drives as I seem to be the local guy at work and with friends to work on their computers(I should start charging a little, I suspect some would disappear). What shocked me was that a few sata drives would not work for booting but would work fine otherwise. I used ext3 on almost all and tried it if the boot did not work. A couple of the drives so confused the installers that they ended up using portions of sda instead sdb. I can be so stupid or stubborn. The first time that use of a certain sata drive in the adapter crashed my sda (main drive) I restored sda and figured I didn't pay enough attention. It happened again exactly like before. Now you think I would have learned right, not me I tried again being real certain at ever step, Now remember I had been using the usb-sata device with other drives and it had worked flawless. Not believing what happened the second time I did the install again and you talk about be cautious I examined every step multiple times. When it failed this time I did a through examination of what was happening. It seems that it wrote to the sda only during a portion of the install instead sdb. Point is it only happened on a couple of specific drive and was repeatable. One was a older IBM drive and I not sure what the other was now. I gave them to a friend(actually I put them in as data drive and they happily exist there). The other point is that the majority of the drives worked fine.

elninio · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2008 Posts: 53

Yes NeddySeagoon, probably 8,17. But so what, we know the driver is correct, and that the root partition is bootable. rootwait/rootdelya is needed for booting root USB devices; http://lwn.net/Articles/330378/ .

elninio · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2008 Posts: 53

I've kept it short to not crowd the thread with info we don't need. The boot partition and fstab

fstab; note root is called /btr/ , but its XFS, it is in fact an XFS partition, and xfstools is installed, and kernel etc for XFS. Of course its probably pointless for me to say this, since I've proven it can boot into gentoo, its a delay problem

btr / xfs noatime 1 2
tmp /tmp tmpfs size=15G 0 0
krn /usr/src/linux-1 tmpfs size=15G 0 0
prc /proc proc 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0

lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DMI (rev 11)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 11)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor System Management Registers (rev 11)
00:08.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor Semaphore and Scratchpad Registers (rev 11)
00:08.2 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor System Control and Status Registers (rev 11)
00:08.3 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor Miscellaneous Registers (rev 11)
00:10.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link (rev 11)
00:10.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Routing and Protocol Registers (rev 11)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset HECI Controller (rev 06)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82577LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 06)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 06)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 06)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev 06)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev 06)
00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 7 (rev 06)
00:1c.7 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 8 (rev 06)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a6)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 06)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT216 [Quadro FX 880M] (rev a2)
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (rev 35)
0d:00.0 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e822 (rev 01)
0d:00.1 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e230 (rev 01)
0f:00.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 03)
17:00.0 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e822 (rev 01)
17:00.3 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd Device e832 (rev 01)
ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-Core Registers (rev 04)
ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 04)
ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 04)
ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 04)
ff:03.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller (rev 04)
ff:03.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Target Address Decoder (rev 04)
ff:03.4 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Test Registers (rev 04)
ff:04.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Control Registers (rev 04)
ff:04.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Address Registers (rev 04)
ff:04.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Rank Registers (rev 04)
ff:04.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Thermal Control Registers (rev 04)
ff:05.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Control Registers (rev 04)
ff:05.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Address Registers (rev 04)
ff:05.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Rank Registers (rev 04)
ff:05.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Thermal Control Registers (rev 04)

in pre-chroot; liveuser]# lspci -vvv |grep modul
Kernel modules: shpchp
Kernel modules: e1000e
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
Kernel modules: shpchp
Kernel modules: shpchp
Kernel modules: shpchp
Kernel modules: shpchp
Kernel modules: shpchp
Kernel modules: shpchp
Kernel modules: iTCO_wdt
Kernel modules: i2c-i801
Kernel modules: nouveau, nvidiafb
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
Kernel modules: iwlagn
Kernel modules: sdhci-pci
Kernel modules: xhci-hcd
Kernel modules: sdhci-pci
Kernel modules: firewire-ohci
Kernel modules: i7core_edac

relevant grub lines

root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb1 rootdelay=50

Edit; I supposed I have to say this, to make sure people are on the same page as me. In fstab there's a kernel mount like, this is one for building kernels that I have set up i'd rather not get into a 10 level tree as to why, but i made sure it does not cause problems.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 1:36 am Post subject:

elninio,

Exact error messages make diagnostics easier for your helper.
It could be that you have grub in your /boor partition and in the /boot directory on / (root).
Then its very easy to get mixed up between kernels and grub.conf files - without even realising it.

What about the other information I asked for ?
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

elninio · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2008 Posts: 53

elninio · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2008 Posts: 53

The partition is error free, but one thing I observed is that baselayout, or whatever the gentoo boot script is called, skips fsck on the partition, even though my fstab reflects it (1). I have (2) flag for dump, and was wondering where does dump create the FS backup? I don't have another drive set up for this, could it be causing the problem?

elninio · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2008 Posts: 53

One thing I haven't tried is 'scandelay', is this a genkernel only thing? I can't find documentation on it, but I'm not using genkernel ...

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 1:50 pm Post subject:

elninio,

I don't think dump is used any more but as your kernel does not mount root, its not relevent, since /etc/fstab cannot be read until root is mounted.
As your grub loads a kernel, its probably not grub either however as you consistently filter the the information I request, I can't confirm that. I still don't know that its loading the kernel you think it is.

Lets assume* thats ok for now, then it has to be in your kernel configuration. Make friends with wgetpaste and post your entire unfiltered fully commented kernel .config file. Tell me the URL wgetpaste gives you.

*Rule 1 of investigation is Assume Nothing
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

elninio · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2008 Posts: 53

I think you're misunderstanding me, depending on how i configure the kernel it mounts root. So, it /is/ relevant, because it should be fscking when i use a kernel that can mount root. This is particularly in important since XFS is known to cause root mounting difficulties if its not fscked with their own special XFS-check tool. Yes, dump probably doesn't matter (I was just asking for my knowledge), but fsck flag in fstab does matter, but its not behaving the way it should. I brought it up because it may shed some light into the kernel's misbehavior. I will upload you the kernel configs; one kernel that works, and one that ought to work (because I know what the options do). The different between them will only be one RAID configuration, which is not relevant to USB booting.

This config works: http://ompldr.org/vN2h3dA/config_big
This config doesn't: http://ompldr.org/vN2h3dg/config_small

I don't remember if ATA SFF support is needed, I think not, but I have it there. RAID isn't needed either. Some other un-necessary stuff is in there too.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 7:51 pm Post subject:

elninio,

The boot process goes as follows. Using the root= or real_root on the kernel command line, the kernel mounts root read only, regardless if the ro option is given.
With root mounted read only, /etc/fstab can be read to determine the filesstem type of root. This is used to run a fsck on root before it remounted read/write.

I suspect you have a race condition in the kernel.

CONFIG_SATA_AHCI=y is the only SATA driver you need but lets just change one thing at a time.

You have CONFIG_HZ_1000=y this is known to give issues on some hardware. Change that in menuconfig to either 250Hz or 300Hz, rebuild and restest.

Everything else looks safe, even if there is a bit of unneeded bloat.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.