systemd fail-to-boot in rawhide

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 21.02.11 22:45, Matthew Miller (mattdm at mattdm.org) wrote:

> 
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 03:54:14PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > > Updated to this morning's rawhide. Rebooted. Now, I get to mounting my
> > > filesystems, which works succesfully, and then it just sits there.
> > I need more information:
> > Is the plymouth screen shown?
> > Does it react to Esc?
> > Can you switch to another VT?
> > Does it timeout after 60s?
> 
> Turns out that it was fscking a filesystem that had been scrolled off the
> screen by other status messages. I left it go overnight and it was up in the
> morning and I could see the output in the log. The old init system used to
> give some indication of progress while this was happening (via a hack in
> fsck, I believe). Is it a systemd change that is suppressing that?

Well, this is a difficult problem, unfortunately.

We already connect stdout/stderr of fsck with syslog and the console at
the same time. That should give you a minimal idea on what is going
on. However no progress bar. In the syslog output the progress bar would
not make much sense probably. fsck (at least in the ext234
implementation) supports the -C parameter to direct progress bar
information (and only the progress bar) to a specific fd. However, that
information is intended for applications to parse it, not to show on the
screen. I am not really sure what to do about this. One option would be
to extend -C to show a "human readable" progress bar on the file name
passed. Then we could just invoke fsck with "-C /dev/console" and would
get a progress bar printed on the console, and the console only. But it
keeps me wondering how that would look like if multiple fs are handled
in parallel.

Another option would be to parse fsck's output and forward it in some
form to Plymouth to show in the normal progress bar. But I am not sure
if Plymouth can actually do that. (Ray?) Also, this doesn't solve the
problem that we might get multiple streams of progress bar information
at the same time and for presentation in plymouth we'd need to somehow
integrate them into one, and whose responsibility would that be?
Plymouth?

I think not having the progress bar for F15 is acceptable, but I am all
ears for suggestions how to implement this best post-F15. Especially if
somebody wants to do the work... ;-)

Or maybe the whole problem set goes away by doing nothing since btrfs
has no fsck? ;-)

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.