USB Boot >2 hours

Chris Tyler chris at tylers.info
Tue Aug 15 03:12:13 UTC 2006


I think I set the record for the slowest successful boot today. I was
doing four or five test installations on different machines and did one
to an external USB disk (20 GB IDE disk in a USB 2.0 highspeed
enclosure). It didn't boot (couldn't find the root filesystem, whether
on an LV or partition), so I started that system in rescue mode,
chrooted to /mnt/sysimage, and then ran a 'yum update' to see if the
latest rawhide would boot.

The boot started, but the system stuck right after the "usb-storage:
device scan complete" message. I was busy with the other systems so I
just left it running in case it would eventually timeout and continue.
Messages of the form "was: XXX sb: XXX now: XXX" appeared every 20-30
minutes (where XXX was a long number with lots of decimals), and after
about 2 hours 15 minutes the system continued with the boot process (!).
Once the system was running, it performed normally and performance was
quite good.

I thought I had missed something and/or was going crazy so I repeated it
on another machine of similar specs. (Even Multics booted in less time
than this :-)

I filed BZ202554 against mkinitrd for lack of a better suspect. Has
anyone else encountered this behaviour?

--
Chris Tyler




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